The best thing I did this deals season was revive my old desktop with a cheap SSD

pcgamer.com:

Every year I sit by the trackside and watch, like some forelock-tugging Matchstick boy, the great train of Cyber Monday PC gaming deals hurtling down the track: knowing that the majority are not, at this stage in life at least, anywhere near my budget. I have a decent laptop and a once-mighty, creaking desktop, but the bigger factor is just being a bit older and having kids which, yes, makes dropping a few thousand quid on a new RTX 4080 setup seem like some distant dream.

But this year circumstances intervened. I recently cleaned my old desktop, which had a 1TB hard disk drive, and something was never quite right afterwards. I could hear the old drive whining and clicking when I started the PC back up: my startup time went from a relatively snappy 10-15 seconds into the minutes, and my read /write speeds went through the floor. Maybe I was overzealous with the dried air, or clumsy when taking it apart, or maybe it was just an old component: but I'd basically screwed it.

For years now the wise souls on PCG's hardware team have been telling me to get an SSD. They said it's the biggest bang-for-your-buck improvement there is. What do these hardware experts know, I thought: until now. This deals season I set out to buy a decent external SSD purely to try and keep my desktop serviceable for another couple of years. The desktop's existing HD was 1TB, so I saw no reason to go above that (and I don't exactly play the latest Call of Duty on this thing), and given I have to Christmas budget for lots of Posca Pens and Rainbowcorns (don't ask) the cheaper the better.

The model I ended up choosing was a Crucial 1TB external drive, and I am here to say that for around $65 my desktop has risen, Lazarus-like, from what looked like an