Originally posted by sherrvonne That’s what I thought. I have Lightroom, Photoshop, Topaz, and several card programs that I use, plus WD’s etc.
I highly recommend Microcenter's house brand PC's. Very good prices, but the best part is that they use off-the-shelf components. This means that as you have new needs or they age, you can pop in new components much more easily (the only caveat is the case size, and maybe the motherboard's slot layouts----some of these are so narrow that a new component like a new graphics board can cover up the adjacent slot, so you can't use that one to plug something else into.
If you are not tech-y, Microcenter's repair department will do the work for you. In terms of storage, SSD drives have come way down in price and gone up in reliability, and they are faster---which is an asset for LR and PS. Extra RAM never hurts, and some of PS and even LR's new capabilities can be RAM hungry.
Your old unit can indeed be repurposed for office work, and that could mean your photo computer could be offline as much as possible, only online for program updates and uploading to the cloud. It's an additional bit of security.
One more thing: Scott Kelby's advice for LR is to have all of your images on external drives---very easy to track stuff, very easy to back it up. Don't store much on your computer at all. With good connections and fast drives, there's no performance lag.
So sorry about your recent personal very rough patch.