My kids just went up to spend roughly a month up at a relatives for the summer, and we had an old PC there in the basement that we had built for them to play games on. It crapped out, and from the description, the problem is the motherboard.
I'm thinking of buying an HP refurb that comes with a new Windows 10 install, $80 price and free shipping. The only thing that gives me pause is the tiny hard drive size - only about 250 gigabytes. I do happen to have a 2TB refurb hard drive here, and of course now I'm wondering if I might be able to xfer the OS & all info on the drive over to the 2TB drive, using something like a Syba SY-ENC50071, which is about $30. I've always wanted a sata drive dock anyway, so that would give me an excuse.
I haven't tried duplicating a hard drive with a working OS on it since the days of DOS and Windows 95, though, so I'm worried that there might be some sort of safeguards that would stop this from working. It's just going to be a game PC, (mostly for rather old and casual game titles) so I'm not really worried about safeguarding data - I just need it to properly boot up to the desktop and let my son install some games after doing this.
Anyone have experience doing this? Thanks for any helpful suggestions.
I'm thinking of buying an HP refurb that comes with a new Windows 10 install, $80 price and free shipping. The only thing that gives me pause is the tiny hard drive size - only about 250 gigabytes. I do happen to have a 2TB refurb hard drive here, and of course now I'm wondering if I might be able to xfer the OS & all info on the drive over to the 2TB drive, using something like a Syba SY-ENC50071, which is about $30. I've always wanted a sata drive dock anyway, so that would give me an excuse.
I haven't tried duplicating a hard drive with a working OS on it since the days of DOS and Windows 95, though, so I'm worried that there might be some sort of safeguards that would stop this from working. It's just going to be a game PC, (mostly for rather old and casual game titles) so I'm not really worried about safeguarding data - I just need it to properly boot up to the desktop and let my son install some games after doing this.
Anyone have experience doing this? Thanks for any helpful suggestions.
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