A high quality CD or DVD transfer is the answer for longevity. According to the Canadian Conservation Institute you can get up to 100 years. Long article on the issue, jump to the summary at the bottom for best practices and expected lifetime for various types of CD, DVD and BD-Rs (Blu-ray): Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays — Canadian Conservation Institute
The drive will have at least 3 partitions that you can see in Disk Management. You can delete some of them there but Windows won’t let you delete the hidden “System” partitions.
To do that you need diskpart, a CMD utility in Windows. Here’s a step by step: How to Delete a Windows Recovery Partition
Be absolutely sure you are selecting the correct drive, there is no recovery or undo from this. Force deleting the partitions will free up the entire drive space and then you can format it in Disk Management.
Several have said not to use multiple AV, only use Defender, etc.
The reason you don’t want multiple AV products installed is they’ll possibly interfere with each other and slow your machine down.
What you can do, for a second opinion on AV issues, is run a one time scan from one of the others. Malwarebytes is great for that sort of thing. Install the free version, don’t let it run on Startup, and ignore the nags to buy the premium version. Then just call it up and run a one time scan anytime. It’s great at rooting out things already installed but as an ongoing AV there are other better ones.
Connect it to another PC and test it. Does it have the same issues? If not then the drive is probably fine, the issue is your PC, perhaps the USB ports were damaged from the spill.
The suggestion to remove the drive from the case may work, or may not. In the past external drives were just internal drives connected to a USB adapter inside the case. Pull the drive and you have a regular SATA drive you can connect internally. Now though many of those drives are NOT regular SATA drives. Where you’d normally have the SATA cable and power connections is a USB adapter soldered to the drive instead.
Double check all of the connections, power to the CPU, motherboard, drives. Unplug and reseat them. Ditto for the cable for the drive.
Does it make any beeps when you try to start it? If yes the pattern can be used to identify the area of the problem.
Do you know it was working before you bought it?
I’ve not done this but what I expect is the new laptop will recognize and activate just fine. The bios of the new laptop should show Windows as activated and as long as the version, Home vs Pro, is the same on both laptops there shouldn’t be a problem. I don’t see it as any different from wiping and doing a clean install, which will work, that I’ve done.
There are a number of ways to restrict access but none are going to be bulletproof.
Mentioned previously are two apps that will restore the PC to a known good status every time it’s rebooted. Deepfreeze is a paid app, Reboot Restore RX is freeware. I believe that for both the saving of documents is not preserved. So pictures, docs, etc. saved after the last reboot will be lost when the PC is rebooted.
You can take an image of the drive with several free programs and then restore that manually. Same issue though, anything saved after the image is taken will be lost.
In both cases saving docs, pictures, etc. to an external drive may solve that issue as the software will probably only restore the main drive. Malware can infect the external drive but most will not.
Teamviewer is a paid program for remote access that is made available for personal use for free. I install it on every PC I’m asked to support. That however requires the client to start it at the remote location and give you a password. It can be set up for unattended access, which gives you unrestricted access to their PC. That requires a high level of trust and not anything I’d recommend.
I support a number of elderly users myself and I invest the time to educate them on basic security. (If you didn’t initiate the call, don’t trust it. Never click on links in email without verifying them, “Judy, did you send me a link?”, etc). I get emails/text asking “what is this, is it safe?” for common program updates and similar but I’d rather that than cleaning out an infection.
A clean install is your only option. Here’s an article that gives a step by step on how to do it: How to Reinstall Windows 10
You create the installation USB by using a clean PC, not yours, and downloading and running the Media Installation Tool to create a USB you’ll use to boot your PC.
Step #8 is important, deleting the existing partitions. While it’s technically possible for an infection to survive this process it’s extremely unlikely, 99.9% will be nuked by this.
This means you have to reinstall all your programs, nothing on that drive will survive this. Also do a scan of that USB you saved your personal files on in case the malware attached itself to it.
Consider this an opportunity to upgrade dad’s PC.
Afterwards you could delete all the partitions on the HDD, reformat it, and use it a backup drive.
Also, the new install will activate itself once it’s connected to the internet.
Powerline can be finicky. Run a few tests of throughput on something like Speedtest.net, with and without the new monitor. If you see a significant difference with the new monitor then it’s causing line problems is probably the answer.
The only thing I can suggest is put the two, the monitor and the powerline adapter, on different circuits. Maybe in a room in the same area that you can run a cable from. That might not be possible in which case you can see if another adapter has any better luck.
I’m assuming just running cable isn’t an option.