Well, here is the latest. They system totally crashed. I couldnt boot from C:, even into safe mode. I could not even boot from a clone of C I made a few months ago. System recovery or system restore also crashed. Repair disk also didnt work.
Finally, I was able to get the machine to boot from the original Win 10 DVD. Unfortunately that is a very old version of Windows. I cant even install my gpu drivers because it is so old. I am running update after update, hoping to finally get to 22H2. (I had to reformat C: to get Windows to reinstall from the DVD). So we will see. Still hoping to get Win 22H2 to install and decide what to do from there.
What a f'ing nightmare!
I know you don't want to hear this but it could save you $$$$.
Since you don't have the latest and greatest hardware you can extend the life of them under linux distros and still manage to use all your data/ files and even games. I did it.. it's in my other thread but basically while windows sees NTFS and linux prefers ext4/ btrfs.. they BOTH see ex-fat just fine.
So if you want.. you can just take a stable linux distro.. install steam and play your games and still have access to all your data. I've only found 2 instances of where I could not do something in linux..
#1 Battlefront 2 - that game's EA launcher seems to bug out
#2 Avery design label print software..
So I have to dual boot into windows 10 to do that but other than that I'm completely able to do everything I need. I don't know how much a new pc would cost but it would not be cheap so just think about it and I wish you all the best with whatever you decide!