How many of you have 3d printers?

@mike-parsons If you worked with VB6, depending on the time frame you very likely were using what is now VSCode or it's predecessor.

YES, being able to step through the code one line at a time observing variables changing is one debugging tool. Another is setting what we call a watchpoint on a variable, something like if it equals zero stop. The Arduino IDE 2.x does have that but requires only certain boards with extra wires. Fortunately very few of us here on the forum are likely going to write anything big enough (1,000 <> 10,000 lines of code) to need those features. Most sketches are less than 100 lines with only a few going up to 1,000 lines.

Sorry, I got you confused with someone else. I can't help with your PC purchase, but maybe consider buying the components at AliExpress and assembling your own. Cost will be similar, but you can build with an eye to upgrades. I used to do that a lot but didn't know about AliExpress.