I'm back with my Lenovo Y50-70 touch. My old gaming laptop bought in 2015 came with Windows 8.1 installed on the 1TB HDD. I've had 3 HDD in the laptop 1TB , 500GB WDs, and currently a 2TB Seagate FireCuda SSHD 5400rpm with Windows 10 installed and loaded by the vendor who sold it too me.
The drive was bought and installed in November 2018 and now in 2021 I believe it is failing because I constantly have disc errors that cannot be solved, laptop takes forever to load, everything stops responding every now and then, and Task Manager says disc is at 100%.
My dad and I plan to get a new 2.5 inch SSD about 250 GB and freshly install Windows 10. Not really keen on going back to the vendor because we can't exactly monitor what he is installing. So I have a few questions:
1. Does it sound about right that the HDD is causing majority of the problems or is my whole laptop dying?
2. When it comes to installing Windows from a USB, how do I activate Windows? I've read that laptops have something like a Windows signature in the motherboard that is like an activation key? Will this work for installing Windows 10 since my laptop came with Windows 8.1 pre-installed?
Basically I don't know what to do from Activate Windows onwards haha. Please help.
PS - I'm aware Linux is also an option. I'm willing to try Linux too but my father and I want to try Windows first so he can have MS Office and all that stuff.