That's my impression too. Laptops, once you get past discrete components like disks, are sort of viewed as disposable. Like the income you use to buy them. 
You might be able to find the same model used and could just move the hard drive over. Or one with a cracked screen or something on eBay and can Frankenstein them together.
Ooooohhh... I would not have thought of those options.
First definitely check by connecting an external monitor.
If that comes up, it might reveal an error or something that could be helpful.
Also check the power connector if it is USBc. There could be lint or something blocking that is preventing it from charging. USBc charging can be finicky after a year or two.
Other than that, the used laptop is a solid way to go. Or if you need to get more than a couple of years out of it, replace with new.
Another thing is perhaps a short in the case. Make sure all the screws are firmly in place.
I am looking for a home intercom solution but not a typical one. I would like a system that would run over WiFi instead of a standard radio and has support for virtual intercoms on the PC. Video would be a bonus. I don't want a cloud solution.
If nothing exists, I might just get a regular intercom and run 3.5mm to and from the PC.
Not entirely sure how you are using it. But....Amazon Echo Dots function as wifi intercoms.
Or just a cheap Wyze camera even has sound in/out and doesn't have to be cloud enabled/subscription.
get a set of walkie talkies, plug them into the wall and mount them 
I have 4TB of games I want to move to a new 6TB drive. Both are external drives. I'm currently using FreeFileSync to do this on windows 10.
If this fails what would be a better way to do this?
I have 4TB of games I want to move to a new 6TB drive. Both are external drives. I'm currently using FreeFileSync to do this on windows 10.
If this fails what would be a better way to do this?
Is there some reason you need a special program for this? Whenever I've had to do something similar I just open both drives in desktop windows and drag the files from one to the other.
Once upon a time I had a Windows GUI utility that I used both for backups and for copying massive numbers of files around. I have a VERY large digital music library, most of which I ripped from CD myself. I used this utility because it would calculate a CRC when copying files to verify the copy worked properly. I never once ran into an error, but that check gave me some peace of mind.
I wish I could remember the name of it.
Is there some reason you need a special program for this? Whenever I've had to do something similar I just open both drives in desktop windows and drag the files from one to the other.
It sucks if the copy fails or is otherwise interrupted, because Windows copy doesn't give you great tools for reconciling file differences. And Windows copy is prone to failure/interruption for no good reason.
TeraCopy beats Windows explorer copy all day, every day. FreeFileSync is OK but significantly slower.
On a non-Windows platform, an rsync based solution would be my preference. Haven't really tried rsync in a Windows environment for serious copying, because I'm not usually in a Windows environment for serious copying, and TeraCopy handles my Windows needs fine.
I’d like to get my 8 year old a way to listen to music in his room without going full Alexa mode ( we have family Amazon music for streaming) is there a good way of getting something set up that will let him listen without having access to much else?
CD Player? Maybe an old MP3 player where you can upload the music to it directly instead of giving access to the internet.
A turntable and a fat stack of $1 LPs from your local record store.
The lower tech solution is tempting we don’t have a huge amount of storage in his room though.
I have 4TB of games I want to move to a new 6TB drive. Both are external drives. I'm currently using FreeFileSync to do this on windows 10.
If this fails what would be a better way to do this?
I found the utility I used to use, it's called Beyond Compare. It is probably complete overkill for what you need because it has all kinds of features (which I never used) for doing diffs & merges for text files, among other things. I pretty much only used it for the "safe" copy & sync features.
I’d like to get my 8 year old a way to listen to music in his room without going full Alexa mode ( we have family Amazon music for streaming) is there a good way of getting something set up that will let him listen without having access to much else?
Hmm...
I think I'm going to look into refurbishing my old iPod for when my daughter gets a little older...
Baron Of Hell wrote:I have 4TB of games I want to move to a new 6TB drive. Both are external drives. I'm currently using FreeFileSync to do this on windows 10.
If this fails what would be a better way to do this?
I found the utility I used to use, it's called Beyond Compare. It is probably complete overkill for what you need because it has all kinds of features (which I never used) for doing diffs & merges for text files, among other things. I pretty much only used it for the "safe" copy & sync features.
So my attempt mostly worked. There were two folders that failed to get copied, Xboxgames and WindowsApp.
The problem being I didn't have permission to copy the files. So I changed the permissions of folders. Ran FrefileSync again and this time most of files were copied. 143 files were not copied from WindowsApp and 11 files weren't copied from Xboxgames.
The problem was the same with permissions but I was unable to change the permissions this time. The option to do so was greyed out. And there was file corruption warning in properties that stated this would prevent the changing of permissions.
To fix that I read I needed to run chkdsk. This did not work for me. Windows came back saying there were no problems.
So I'm just going to finish playing the one game I am currently playing on gamepass . I'm not currently playing form the windows store. I'll just reinstall the other games when I'm ready for them. All my games from all other sources copied over without a problem.
Those folders probably have some copy protection on it. I usually use the xbox app to transfer those files to another drive.
Question! About transferring Windows to a new machine.
I'm building a new gaming box to replace my current win10 machine. I gather win11 is a free upgrade, but the current box specs are too old to upgrade, so I'm hoping to transfer my current win10 into having win11 on the new machine. Not 100% sure whether that's even possible - but if so, the question is then whether I need to deactivate the old box before transfer, whether I can install win11 on the new box or whether I need to install 10 > activate > upgrade, etc.
The current win10 machine is activated with a digital license, but not linked to a microsoft account (yet, anyway). It's not an OEM key - I think I originally bought a retail win7 key and later upgraded/activated to win10.
Anybody know about this stuff? 
Microsoft has basically ceased caring about non-corporate Windows licensing. To be blunt, I think doing anything other than downloading and installing the Windows 11 ISO from Microsoft and activating it with Microsoft Activation Scripts (MAS) is a waste of time.
Microsoft owns Github now, so in a very real sense they are distributing the tool to perform HWID activations of Windows. Microsoft support engineers have been known to use MAS themselves to fix license upgrade issues on end user PCs.
As one Reddit comment I saw put it, "literally everyone uses this". I think trying to migrate a license to avoid using an activator is pointless if MS themselves will turn around and use that same activator as soon as your license migration hits a snag.
Oh wow, I'm very out of date. What is MAS doing there - twiddling registry keys to make win11 think it's activated? Or doing stuff with licensing servers to tell MS that it's activated?
Oh wow, I'm very out of date. What is MAS doing there - twiddling registry keys to make win11 think it's activated? Or doing stuff with licensing servers to tell MS that it's activated?
It generates a hardware ID and sends it to Microsoft's activation servers using a valid generic product key. Microsoft's servers then send back a valid digital license.
It's no secret to MS that tons of PCs are activating every day using the same key, and they could block it at any time, but seemingly have no interest in doing so.
Maybe they've hit a point where they figure they make more from the extra eyes on their app store than they would on license enforcement.
They make their money on Office 365 subscriptions from consumers.
hmm, that MAS thing is interesting, might make it worth my while to grab one of those, do a fresh install of 11 on a new partition of my boot drive so I can easily switch back to win10 if i hate 11.
If you have multi monitors Win 11 putting windows back where they belong is worth anything I lost from Win10
They make their money on Office 365 subscriptions from consumers.
MS365 accounts for 23% of their revenue. The biggest source (38%) is Azure corporate cloud services. (Source)
One consumer/enterprise software product is nearly as profitable as their entire corporate cloud offering? Holy sh*t!
For comparison, Oracle, which has one fifth the revenue of Microsoft (and yet is second in software vendors!) gets over 60% of it's revenue from its Cloud offerings.
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