#im going to play dorf on the laptop i share with my wife now. farewell.

[voidsumbrella]

so ive been using window 7 since high school, right, first on my laptop, and i stuck with it for my desktop bc windows 10 had only come out pretty recently- windows 8 had been such a fucking mess that i wanted to make sure it was, yknow, functional. i continued not upgrading bc i found the format to be kind of irritating, and also bc im lazy and have a pretty firm "if it aint broke dont fix it" policy. i continued not upgrading after they discontinued support bc i have become increasingly bitter about how much corporate spyware is crammed onto every electronic on the face of the planet.

this was fine until last year, when i finally started running into programs i actually wanted to run flat not working on win7, and by programs i mean games, and by games i mean elden ring. so i dissected my old gaming laptop, removed the 2 500gb hard drives, shoved 'em my desktop, and used one of them to dual boot the thing to windows 10, which i had to spend enough energy on setting up in a way i was comfortable with that by the end i was just like "ill use this... later..." and then didn't. i still haven't played elden ring.

im now running into more programs that aren't compatible, including csp 2.0, and i want that align tool badly enough to bite the bullet and switch to using win10 full time. this means i have to swap which drive is running which- win10 needs to be on my main hard drive (2tb, runs faster) along with all my files, win7 needs to be on one of the 500gb drives with any older progams incompatible w/ win10 (the other 500gb drive is for overflow storage; i like to micromanage my file organization).

it doesn't appear to be possible to just switch them simultaneously, which tracks, that feels like a bit of a tall ask. so the gameplan then became to:

1) empty the storage drive and merge both the 500gb drives into one 1tb partition

2) shuffle files onto flash drives so my win7 side is under 1tb (~200gb, no i do not have any one device that fits that, i had to play data tetris on like 4 different ones, if someone wants to give me $100 to get a better external that would be great)

3) make a disc image of the win7 data on my 1tb external

4) wipe the 2tb drive, move the win10 data onto the clean disc (possibly by merging the partitions?)

5) restore the file data to win10

6) re-dual boot and restore all win7 data on the 1tb side

7) make sure all my shit got shuffled over properly; move anything fully win10 incompatible onto external storage (may involve wiping external hard drive, we'll see)

8) factory restore win7 to default settings, fully clearing file data

9) repartition the 500 gb storage unit; untetris all the overflow data back into place

10) manifest an extra hundred dollars or so and purchase an external drive with 4+ tb data as i should have done like 5 years ago ._.

im currently on: step 3! and have been for roughly 3 days now, bc large backups are Fucking Slow and it took me a hot second to find out that win7's native backup+disc image creator straight up won't process a 2tb disc, you need to download some other software. also because tech problems are bad for my blood pressure, and i have other shit to do in my life.

the backup software (it actually came with my external but i never actually installed, because i havent had to backup the entire drive and os for this pc before. the os backup was technically. like 7 years old. from my laptop. and i never thought to replace it, i just kept the files updated as needed) is currently like halfway through and if it gives me another error message before it finishes i will. i dont know. lay down and cry, probably.

did i ever actually post the tech saga. i havent been able to use my desktop properly in like a week.