The majority of people I know who have major computer problems solve them by buying another computer

I’m not even that tech illiterate, but I almost did that… My laptop was being slow, and I still had like 4k€ in overtime hours that I could buy Hardware from at work (it’s a great deal because I neither have to pay VAT on the hardware nor income taxes on the money from the overtime), so I was like, eh, might as well get a new laptop.
So then I read up on what laptop brands are out there, found out about Framework, and when I excitedly told my electrical engineer husband about it he was like “You knooow that you can easily replace parts in any laptop, right?”
Well, I didn’t know that (just kinda assumed laptops were more like phones than they are like desktop PCs), so I ended up just ordering a new SSD and new RAM for my laptop. It’s back to being butter smooth, but I have a hunch that cleaning the dust from the fans while I was in there was a very large factor in that haha

I used to work at a locally run computer store, and one of the biggest upgrades for most people was going from a mechanical hard drive to an SSD. Made a night and day difference.

Ooh, totally! I did have an SSD in there before, but it was only 256GB, so I had to store most files on the HDD and be extremely selective about what to install to C:. Going up to 8TB felt very liberating, I no longer have to fear that an npm install might crash my whole machine! (at least not due to space constraints, npm will figure out how to crash it for other reasons)

If the crashing stopped by replacing the SSD probably the SSD is end-of-life. SSDs basically wear down with each write action and when they reach their terabytes written limit they can start crashing the system.