So, I’ve been writing a 175k word One Piece fanfic for about 6 months. Most of my writing is done on a 10 year-old laptop I dug out of the closet while I wait for my kid to finish sports practice. Today, the hard-drive died. (Thankfully I have a cloud backup.)
Now, without a laptop, I have nothing to continue working on. I can’t afford a new laptop. Just glad I didn’t lose all my work.
It’s the OS license that’s the main problem.
That should be fine. I haven’t had to do it but everywhere I’ve seen says it’s tied to your hardware and it should be fine when you reinstall windows. Though with a dead laptop I’m not sure if you’re able to get a USB with the bootable media.
Your license is tied to the laptop.
Windows should remember the BIOS and activate fine, I think. And as posted below, you can extract they key if that doesn’t work.
You can get the install medium on a USB stick from Microsoft for free.
There’s probably a sticker with the license code on the laptop somewhere.