i may have found something extremely useful at the very bottom of my phone's camera roll. gotta see if it works first, but if it does... ouo
what i'd found was a photo of the license key for my old laptop's windows 7 - the one that i had somehow managed to transfer to my desktop when i first got it back in like 2016. i remembered reading somewhere that win7 and win10 keys are interchangeable, so i got my hopes up! i looked it up again just to check, and...
...apparently microsoft had disabled using windows 7 keys to activate windows 10 just last october, i.e. less than a month after i'd changed my parts... meaning that, while it might not have worked anyways, i could have tested it if i'd just realized i still had that key saved - but now i'll never know if it would've. damnit!