[Leica] OT: Old PC, New PC

[Peter Klein]

OT but relevant:
My faithful, almost 10 year-old Dell Optiplex 980 is doing two odd 
things. I do plan to replace it after Christmas, when (if?) 
unload-the-inventory sales kick in. But in the meantime:

1. Whenever the power goes out, I have to crawl under my desk, pull the 
CMOS battery, and put it back. I can't just hit F2 and fix the 
configuration because the internal error checks kick in before "Press F2 
for setup" happens. They display lights on the PC front that Dell does 
not document meaningfully. Once CMOS is reset, I find that the date and 
time are forgotten, and more important, the disk configuration forgets 
that it is a non-RAID AHCI SSD disk. Once I set those two things 
straight, all's well. No, it's not the battery, which reads slightly 
over 3v on my multimeter. And I've replaced the battery twice, with the 
same results.  Everything else in the BIOS is as I set it previously.

2. I cloned the original disk to an SSD a couple of years ago. Since 
then, the PC runs significantly faster in general. But every so often, 
there is a long hesitation when loading a program, or when switching 
from one program to another.

Gruesome details: Win10 professional (which was upgraded from Win7, so 
the registry has all old installation remnants on it).  8 GB RAM, 433 GB 
Crucial SSD system drive with 268 GB free, 1.81 TB conventional HDD data 
drive with 1.23 TB free. The latter has all my photos on it. The 
motherboard doesn't have a fast/broad enough path to take full advantage 
of the SSD, but it still helps. The SSD is trimmed and the HDD data 
drive is defragged weekly. I back up my data to both an external SSD and 
a conventional drive regularly.

Questions:
1. Anything simple I could do to improve things?
2. Recommendations for a new PC?  I've not kept up with hardware in the 
last few years.

I wouldn't mind something smaller than an under-the-desk tower. I do 
want 16 GB RAM. I don't need a "screamer" gamer's PC, but low end is too 
low for me. Aside from the usual Web surfing, writing and email, I do 
three things with the PC:

* Photo editing, up to 24 GB Raw files.
* Music composition. Editing is not hugely resource intensive. Playback 
is comparable to photo editing. I don't do video except to occasionally 
trim the "dead air" at the beginning and end of a video musical performance.
* Amateur radio.  Mostly digital signal processing, which is sometimes 
heavy on the processor, not really taxing the rest of the system much. 
And my log, which is a SQL light database.

Thanks for any input.
--Peter