DrMacintosh

All brick and concrete means you're going to have some significant signal challenges. Home being so old, with messy wiring, means that powerline adapters really are not viable either. Mesh is your only real option. What is the approximate square footage of your home? Knowing this should help in figuring out how many mesh nodes you might need.

Personally, I own 2 Linksys Velop MX4200 mesh wifi 6 routers. These device are super solid and I can count on one hand how many times I've had to restart them. Linksys has a huge lineup of routers, anything Wifi 6 or greater from them should be a great experience.

https://www.linksys.com/gb/shop/shop-home/mesh-wifi-systems/

This Mac supports macOS Monterey. Go to the Mac App Store, search for macOS Monterey, download it, install it.

A 2015 MacBook Air/Pro is about all you're gonna be able to get for $300. Not really worth it.

Is this a fresh install of Windows? Have you removed your old chipset/graphics drivers? Is your memory set to beyond the base speed?

What is "system latency"? Have you made sure your refresh rate is set properly on your monitors?

Have you tried to rescan your library? 

You don't really need a NAS, what you need is a backup solution. A NAS itself is not a backup. Checkout BackBlaze. Really cheap unlimited cloud storage. They can ship out up to 8TB drives for recovery purposes. You can also download about 500GB of data at a time from their downloader.

My AppleTV and Plex server chillin right now.

I'm not entirely sure how USB controllers function, but is it possible for a controller to reduce a ports speed if it runs out of available bandwidth? If it is possible, OPs USB controllers could be overloaded, and some stuff needs to be unplugged. 

Or its the cable

Losing power like a blackout is going to be related to the PSU. Time for a new one.

Make sure your network is not blocking your laptop. I would also make sure your laptop is not set to manually target a specific DNS server.

One simple sanity check would be to connect your laptop to your phones hotspot. If everything works as normal, then you know its a network configuration error.

Professional Audio? Thunderbolt? Doing this for a living?

Yeah, its no contest. Get the Mac mini. Every audio interface brand in the world has thought about the Mac. This is audio, so you're not going to need crazy amounts of memory. Apple Silicon slaughters audio workloads, especially if you buy Logic Pro.

The Mac and professional Audio/Video just go together. The Mac simply has a better audio processing infrastructure.

an SMB file share

4 minutes ago, Sauron said:

No... if those games only work on 7 then you can't play them any more.

Ok see, that’s why comparability mode is

important and it’s a feature Windows 11 still has. 

2 hours ago, Sauron said:

All we want is to be able to install and play games we bought.

You can still play those games. You just need a computer that is compatible with Steam. 

50 minutes ago, ReanimationXP said:

Windows 10 was released in 2015, over 8 years ago, and is still widely in use. You'd be hard-pressed to find a game which runs on Windows 10 now that didn't then

Every service based app has a cutoff point. Microsoft no longer supports older builds of Windows 10 and will stop supporting it altogether relatively soon. All the standalone programs will still work because that’s how computers work. Apps on Mojave won’t stop working, Steam, which is a service, is just electing to not let it work on Mojave bc it’s obsolete. 

Mojave was released in September of 2018. That was 5+ years ago. A Windows 10 build from 5+ years ago would also not support a lot of things.

There is one main reason to get the shield. That is: You have Dolby Vision content in your Plex library. 

Otherwise, I don't see a reason to not go with the Apple TV. The performance and software support is unmatched. 

Start browsing eBay/FaceBook marketplace for old used laptops. Avoid HDD based boot drives if possible. eBay has useful filter tools. Just set your max price to $400 and start window shopping.

Easy. Get a MacBook Air.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air/15-inch-midnight-apple-m2-chip-with-8-core-cpu-and-10-core-gpu-256gb

46 minutes ago, SetOutMode said:

I was hoping to use it to back up my phone like iTunes used to do.

They also have an Apple Devices app in development. Again, all beta stuff. Best option is iCloud backup. The 200GB iCloud plan is not too expensive. 

iTunes on Windows is all but deprecated. Apple has had an Apple Music app in development on Windows for a long time now. Still not fully released app. Anyway, you can use the Apple Music website to gain access to your Apple Music library on PC.

Apple sells USB-C EarPods for $19. But if your computer does not have a Type-C port, those won't be of much use to you. 

57 minutes ago, Adamm01 said:

Do you think the M3 is worth the $900 more? Under a bit of a time pressure, M1 deal ends tomorrow

Here is a comparison between the generations:

Granted, these are all the Max versions. But M3 Pro is better than M1 Max, by quite a bit in CPU tasks, but by miles in 3D tasks. 

Just my 2 cents. For a film production major, I would agree with getting the 36GB of RAM. Especially if you're going to be handling 4K+ content. However, for storage, 1TB will fill up fast and you might be better served getting only the 512GB model to save cash and simply editing off of external storage. 

I think the M3 would be your best bet. M3 actually adds hardware raytracing support, just fyi.