

You could upgrade, but if you actually want to learn tech I would recommend getting a server. Grab an old HP or similar machine and chuck a few HDDs into it and install proxmox. Keep all the VMs off your main system and then you can shut down without impacting them. If you mess up badly you will still have your main system to help recover from the mistake.
I have a HP EliteDesk 800 G3 as a server at home. It is small enough to fit on my printer stand, it has two 4Tb HDDs for data in raid 1 and one 256Gb SSH for the OS and VMs to run from. It has 32GB of RAM and works really well. I have a few VMs for managing media, one for my personal jabber server (Open fire), another for calendar and contact sync, and Syncthing. I also have another 16GB of RAM unallocated so far which makes me itch for another VM to spin up, but so far I haven’t had something come to mind service wise. Because it is all off my main system I can do updates, change my HDD, take my machine with me, and I always know my server is OK. The same goes in reverse, I won’t bork my main system when doing server stuff. It is very handy and I find it useful to segregate things, but your situation obviously could demand a different approach. That said, I would recommend it instead of upgrading just because of the stability and segregation of risk.