I updated my video card drivers last night, which turned into a two-hour tech support issue. The fans on my second video card stopped turning, the display wasn't recognized. Wiped all my drivers out and reinstalled, still nothing. Thought I'd burnt out my hardware somehow.

Come to find out that this version of the driver enables crossfire by default, even if you had manually disabled it before (and previous versions had it disabled by default). There's no indication that it's changed the setting though, so it was just like 'hey, no monitor lol'. The best part was after I turned it back off and got my second monitor back, a window popped up saying 'Hey your settings aren't optimized!' and suggested I turn crossfire on.

The lesson is: if you touch it it might break and you might have no idea why, because some developer (or manager) made a stupid decision somewhere to change a user's settings without asking them.

I sure have found a lot more discarded PC's than I have toasters.

If you can't produce a system (hardware, software, and "support" if absolutely necessary) which can outlast a toaster by design (decade or two at least), without a need to "upgrade" these elements, then many a consumer would naturally compare your engineering unfavorably to that of the toaster.

I am somewhat sympathetic to that. Because if you look at it, replacing a perfectly good, expensive machine for a new one every three years sounds ridiculous. But this situation is 50% greed and 50% technological progress, so we keep throwing away stuff that works to get stuff that does the same, only a bit faster.