Well all and all it wasn't a total disaster at all. I got hold of PGMusic on the chat line on Saturday and they sorted the activation loss for me and was able to "deactivate" the now dead machine so I am back to square one on that. Kudos to PGMusic and their support team. Can't say enough for them.

I rebuilt my HP Envy DV7 laptop from scratch and now have it mirrored to the way my Desktop machine was and cabled my 27" monitor via a HDMI cable so my 70+ year old eyes wont be the next to go.

The big task is deciding which Motherboard, CPU, memory, fan and case I need to get. Any suggestions are welcomed. Since this build I am hoping will last another 10+ years, I need need to chose wisely, as they said in Indiana Jones movie.

Since I build my own, pcpartpicker.com was suggested to me and since I live equal distance from Kansas City and St Louis, MicroCenter has been visited by me many times before.

With 20+ CPU's and 50+ MB's to chose from, the end choice would be decided by both budget and reliability factors. Since I am an old AMD fan, I tend to lean towards them.

I am not really a gamer and tend to more productivity activities such as audio and video editing. Been looking into AI software that can separate old mono recordings into separate tracks so you can re-combine them into true stereo and that takes a fairly powerful processor.

And of course, one of the items will be purchasing then will be a anti-static wrist strap and mat.

BIAB2026
Windows 10 Pro (Never Windows 11!)
WA6NCB