Yes, you can't have an Area Code or Exchange that starts with "0" or "1", or end in "11". Not sure about other constraints, and I'm not doing the math, but with almost everybody has at least one phone number, and some have 2 or 3 (home, work, cell, fax); I wonder when the US (for example) will run out of phone numbers? And, what will they do then?

I am retired, but I still have 4 phone numbers (2 shared with my wife).

I before E, except after C, or when your foreign neighbor Keith receives eight counterfeit beige scientific sleighs from a feisty caffeinated weightlifter.

I which I could remember the vendor that I had good customer service from (but I can't, and can't find it in my emails). I had a Flash drive go "write-protected" such that I couldn't delete my sensitive data from it (and therefore, I didn't want to send it back). They said, no problem, just send a picture of it being destroyed. I did, and they sent me a refund.

And, then there was Verbatim "Tuff N Tiny" (sadly, they don't make it any more). I have carried one or another on my keychain for probably 20 years. They take a licking, and keep on ticking... have never failed.

Secondly, I can't say that I have never had a card fail after I started using it. Below is a picture of my "graveyard" of flash that has failed for one reason or another. Yes, there is a pny in there.

I will also call out the Kingston, because, even though it had a 5 year warranty, they screwed me around rather than honoring it.

First off, Manufacturers don't have time to fully test their flash memory products before they ship them, so the first thing that I do when I get at new flash/SD, etc, is to test it myself (it uses up one of the write cycles, but it is worth it). I use a free program called "h2testw" which fills the card and then makes sure that it can read it back. If the card is big or slow, it takes a while, so I start it off and leave it overnight.

I would estimate that as many as 5% of the flash or SD card that I buy fail the test, and I return them. I have usually had pretty good luck with Microcenter flash, but I recently bought a 5 pack, and 2 of them were bad. I returned all 5, no problem (I will wait a while before I buy more of that type in case it was a bad batch).

I would prefer one less point of failure, BUT unfortunately, it is a supply and demand issue rather than a technical issue.

Because full size SD cards are mainly used in Cameras (which only "we" uses), and micro SD cards are used in (android) cell phones (which half the world uses); microSD are higher capacity, faster, and cheaper than full size SD cards.

FYI: Farmland to Solar Farms, Not just in Texas:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/solar-capacity-grows-some-americas-most-productive-farmland-is-risk-2024-04-27/

I have never seen anything to that extreme, but I have seen serious photographer put their tripod in salt water, with their multi-thousand dollar camera setup just a few inches above the waves, and though to myself: Well, I guess that's why I will never be a serious photographer.

Something else that occurred to me as I wrote this: Back in the day, cell phone carriers used to charge ~$50 (or whatever) to move your number to a new phone; because most people didn't know that all they had to do was move the SIM card. Once people learned that, the carriers missed out on that service charge. They would grumble about it; but from a technical standpoint, they couldn't stop you (they might have claimed contract violation).

Now with the new eSIMs, I don't (yet) know how to move an eSIM to a new phone without help from the carrier... I see number transfer service charges coming back....

Correct: if it doesn't work, just move it back to the first phone.

That is not correct. The SIM card primarily holds the phone number and the ability to use it. It is possible to store a few contacts on the SIM card, but most (android) phones don't do that by default. Other data such as pictures could be stored on a SD card, but most android phones don't do that by default (and iPhones don't support internal SD cards).

Moving the SIM to the new phone "should" move the phone number and the ability to use it to the new phone. But, a few caveats: the new phone must be unlocked. Also (a little harder to explain), but for best results, the new phone must support the protocols and should be optimized for the frequencies used by the carrier in your country. Look on the description of the new phone to make sure that it is compatible with your cell phone company and country. If you get a phone that is optimized for a different region (like Asia), it will probably work where the cell coverage is strong, but may not work well where the cell coverage is weak.

Also, you have to make sure that your new phone has a SIM slot in the first place. Some newer phones (some versions of the Samsung S23+, for example) only support eSIM (electronic SIM: a soft copy of the SIM data), and don't even have a SIM slot.

I agree, it "performs" fine, I guess... I haven't noticed it being significantly slower (as major windows upgrades seem to be... to make you want to buy faster hardware). But, they move things around to make them harder to access. Things, that used to be one right click away, are now two levels down, or moved into system settings. All that blank space at the left of the task bar, if you don't use widgets. There is probably some 3rd party software somewhere that move it all back to where it was with win10, but I haven't found it yet.

When my hardware gets too old, I load Linux on it (which runs fine on older hardware), but I don't need that many Linux machines and I use Windows as my primary user interface (since too much software isn't available on Linux, or is too much of a hassle to load).

If they were both slow, my first guess is that, for some reason, the writing to the USB HDD is slow.

To verify (or disprove) that, use CrystalDiskMark, or similar, to test the speed writing to your USB HDD.

I haven't used EaseUS ToDo, but that is much much slower than Macrium Reflect would be. (still sticking with the free version but I need to find an alternative since free version of MR is no longer being updated)

There are a lot of things to check... To start, use CrystalDiskMark, or similar, to test the speed writing to your USB HDD.

Yes, same here... but I wonder how I could get that $99 for 3 years that red6 mentioned.