Ugh. I can't imagine paying for it.

You get what you pay for - or in this instance a little less. I'm fairly certain that according to the detail of the MS licensing arrangements I can make major changes to my PC and still reactivate it. It gets tricky in two areas. 1) the digital license from accepting a free update from Win 7 and later to Win 10 is not transferable. So if you do make changes, it's the story of the broom with two new brushes and one new handle. It seems there's an internal policy. Change your motherboard etc once. That's OK. Do it twice and you'll probably have to go through the phone route. This may explain why my PC isn't listed on the activation server, but is listed on my MS account. (I swapped in an identical ancient mobo a year or so back and it reactivated fine). The internal policy apparently is that after 5 hardware changes, major or otherwise, they'e going to start muttering, and may well argue that you're doing a transfer. 2) The other tricky area is that at the level of MS support I'm likely to encounter, I probably know as much in most areas, and more in others than they do., and it's very likely that I'll get refused a reactivation on the grounds that the provided method doesn't work, so I must be wrong. 
Anyhoo, I can't be arsed with all this so I'm going to update from Win 10 home to Win 11 pro as there are some extra bits I'd like to play with.

Upgrade to 10 pro took under 5 minutes, now downloading 11 pro (still a free update). 12 is on the horizon. Wonder if that will be a free update.

Pretty sure most users get Windows through single-use disposable computers (tossed when the slightest problem or perception of slowness manifests). Buying retail copies is where it can get expensive, unless you go to the dodgy dealers.

Here's a bit of fun. Couldn't install Windows 11 because my system disk is MBR and not GPT. So I tried a partition manager, AOMIE, to convert it. System now unbootable. Anyway, I've got backups of all I need so I thought, clean install time since it's what I should have done anyway. So I stick in a Windows 10 installation USB stick and boot from it. Lo and behold, my Windows 10 pro starts instead of the installer. It's like it's using the USB bootmgr to get to start Windows on the C Drive. In fact that's all it does. It refuses to go to the installer menu.

So I wipe the boot disk. Does this help? Not really. It still tries to load - something. Anything but the installer. Eventually when I elect to "use another operating system" I get to the installer. Will it work? No. It looks like I have to pull all the drives except the target.

Tomorrow.

 

Looks like the problem was the partition manager (AOMIE). Not sure how it fucked the drive, but at least one thing it did was to leave it set to MBR, which in my view is below the minimum requirement for a partition manager's "convert to GPT" function.

 

Yeah the GPT/MBR thing is a Win 11 deal-breaker for me, also the TCM thingy, which I haven't activated on my ~5-yo motherboard because multiboot hassles. Everything I read about 'converting' a drive from MBR to GPT indicated the drive would be effectively wiped.

I accidentally formatted a pair of drives for a RAID 0 to GPT, which seems to work ok, but fdisk complains every time that the "primary GPT table is corrupt, but the backup appears OK, so that will be used." After some googling about it, I concluded let sleeping dogs lie.

Anyhoo, my main takeaway lesson, from this and the "phantom disk" thread, is to beware of false economy.

I had a decent Plex server running for 3 to 4 years using >10 yo bits which was fine. However, when this started to go wrong, penny-pinching made me invest in a large number of ineffective remedies to try and rescue what I had. I now have a decent Plex server on a modern(ish) AM4 board with a Ryzen 3, 16GB of DDR4, enough disk space for the time being, and a new (very old design) Coolermaster case. This should last a while. The downside is that the ancient case design means that the cabling is a total rat's nest. Plus I have a semi-operational SATA card and no obvious way to expand.

If I'd just bitten the bullet straight away, I could have bought something like the much better MSI PRO B550M-VC WiFi motherboards, which has 8 SATA ports and 2 M2 slots, all of which can be used, and a fabulous case like a Fractal Design Meshify 2. When I include things like cables, brackets, case fans (included with the Fractal Design case) etc etc , I'd probably still have change from what I spent.

*Also, I wouldn't have tried to cram everything into the original case, causing a plastic tab to snap off one the SATA drive data connectors so that I now have one drive with a cable that has to stay in place and not be knocked or shaken or the drive stops working!

Go laser. Colour lasers are a reasonable price these days.
Won't get away from the connection issues (though getting network printer might help), but god they're better. Toners don't dry out from infrequent printing. Just run and run.

It's a thought. They look as though they're getting better at photo-prints as well, although from what I've seen they can be a pain to set up for this. But most of our printing is documents anyway.

I fairly recently got a "broken" Brother B&W laser printer off Facebook marketplace for free. Owner said they couldn't connect over Bluetooth/WiFi, app didn't work, cable wouldn't connect.

A quick search told me it wasn't a smart printer in any way shape or form, so attempting a wireless connection was a pointless endeavour anyway.

USB socket was bollocksed. Removed that and soldered an old cable directly to the PCB and it's running perfectly now.

I did buy some replacement USB sockets but that would mean taking it apart again, and my bodge job with the cable is still working. So they're in a drawer waiting to never be used.

Free is the charm as they say. 

I used to do the occasional soldering repair, but recently when I've tried on a couple of components I made a total bollocks of it. I don't know whether it's because I'm older and less "steady of hand" than I was, or the soldering stuff is different, or just that it's a skill you need to keep practicing.

I recently accidentally buggered a 3TB HDD by snapping of the little plastic tab over the data port. Lost the tab somewhere in the mess of my desk. I took an old 120GB donor drive and cut the matching tab off. This is nearly impossible to hold over the flapping pins while pushing a cable on, but it can be inserted into the female cable and then this is wiggled over the pins to make a decent contact. The cable is then glued in place with a hot glue gun. I know that I can make a "proper" repair by swapping the whole HDD circuit board (it's only held on with screws) with a matching donor board with intact SATA connectors. With this HDD, as with most, there's a BIOS chip which has to be desoldered from the original and used to replace the donor BIOS chip. 

1) my recent inability to solder, even though this is a really simple hot-air and flux job is a real blocker. 2) that people have cottoned-on to how straightforward this repair is (for all kinds of issues not just clumsy twats like me) and crappy old circuit boards are being ripped off dead disks and ebayed for silly money, doesn't help 3) but mainly the fact that my bodgy fix works, has stopped me seriously considering this.

The profit (your cost) is in the consumables, the printers are sold below cost.