Suddenly, my copy of Windows is "not genuine."

[MutantAndProud]

6. Realistically any number of small things

Definitely a good idea to make backups, especially once hardware gets 5+ years old. I have a laptop from 2013, fully functional from the 7 era, but with a display that went completely dead after a video card update on windows 11. It shouldn’t be possible for that to happen but it did. I had to find a copy of the bios online, guess which menu the option was in, and press key sequences blindly to allow it to see the basic internal cpu graphics in addition to the secondary chip to see anything on the screen at all before fixing the bad patch setting. It shouldn’t have been able to fail in that way but someone wrote something differently for that one patch and the whole thing collapsed unexpectedly.

In the early days when writing school papers on floppy disk it was wise to save every long sentence or paragraph because it might spontaneously blue screen and lose everything.

These aren’t NASA satellites or mainframes from the 70s.

But you’re welcome happy to assist, I’ve picked up plenty of tools and random info/knowhow over the years.