I've got an ancient HP slim desktop that I keep around as my only Linux box. Starting sometime in the fall I noticed that there was an additional prompt on boot that I had to click through but didn't pay it much mind since I only rebooted when the power went out.

About a month ago I accidentally kicked the power cord out of the wall, and when I restarted I actually noticed the message: The HD was failing. Oops. So I ordered an SSD replacement.

Before it arrived, I rebooted again for some reason and it wouldn't come back up. It did get to the screen where I could select the Ubuntu boot options and I tried safe boot. It got far enough to get to a command line, and I verified that I had nothing on it that I needed to keep - everything backed up to the cloud.

So I put in the SSD, made an Ubuntu bootable thumbdrive, and loaded it up.

Holy crap this thing is faster. Don't get me wrong, it's still ancient with laughably little RAM, but it's usable. Spinning rust is dead to me.