As a puter tech I can tell some stories.

But recently I was swapping the DWs wife pc to Windows 7 from a "borrowed" version of XP. I loaded a clean copy of XP after saving all her stuff on an external drive. Then did the upgrade, worked like magic, no problems, life was good. Of course, this was when my PC decided the power supply in it had reached the day after warranty and decided to act up, a lot. Luckily I had one power supply left floating around, so instead of loading programs, I was swapping out a power module. If it's not one thing, it's another.

And yeah, I can relate to the lighters. None of the ones I had in our kits was any good after only 18 months. So I swapped them all out. Gonna do the vacuum pack thing on all of them. Fact is, I am considering vacuum packing most of the gear, just for giggles. A lot of it won't degrade. The stuff that does get date marked for replacement.