I won't disagree, or agree. If you are running spinning rust rather than an SSD, you are getting exactly what you chose. Just about any use case that justifies spinning rust can be solved with an external platter, thumbdrive, and/or SD card.
The "choice" I made was back in 2009 when I installed 7 to an HDD, which seems like a reasonable choice.
That machine, with dual e5405’s is still in service for gaming at my kid’s place.
Physical install media for 10 is a matter of downloading an .exe and selecting the option for making a thumb drive as the installation disk and then booting from it.
It’s relatively straight forward but there are a few moving parts for sure. Typically f12 to select boot device.
2009 was a long time ago in tech terms.
The same was true for the old Precision workstation a couple of years ago when I gave it to my kid.
And several other machines including a Win7 Thinkpad off eBay.
My advice is download the installation tool and give it a try.
Backup first as needed of course.
Think of all the complaints Microsoft avoids by keeping Windows 10 available without a bunch of time, money, and rigmarole.
My go-to for a low level copy between two different drives is Clonezilla.
GParted is also another live OS with good tools to manage partitions.
I uninstalled the nvidia drivers then installed the ATI ones and it seems to work fine. No activation complaints.
It's actually been very easy to keep this thing running. Pretty much just plug in new parts when old ones fail. I think my spinning rust HDD is about to die though so I should take the suggestions in this thread and go through the process of moving the OS to the SSD.
At some point in the distant past I might have replaced a Core 2 Duo for a Core 2 Quad. Or I may have built it this way, not sure.
Then deinstall all your cpu's (if the number of cores changed), thats no joke...deinstall your cpu's (all of them), then reboot.
Update all the drivers...that's it.