The next step in redoing things with computers 3 and 4 has been to strip out the Inwin mini tower chassis and put the mini ITX board (GA-E350) into it for the Windows computer. When I switched the disks over, with the same type of board as the Antec chassis, Windows didn't notice any hardware change. It seems it can only detect a different type of board, not a different serial number of the same board.
The next job was to transfer Windows itself from the 2.5" laptop HDD which is what the Antec chassis takes, to a regular 3.5" desktop disk. After trying various solutions, the best one I have encountered is Clonezilla, which is a full bootable image tool based on Debian. Simply download the ISO image, flash it to a pen drive, and boot the computer from it. No real tweaking was needed, it was simply configured to clone all of the partitions on the source disk, to the target disk.
Once again on rebooting, this time on the 3.5" disk, Windows 10 came up as expected, with no activation issues, and everything of course right there just as it was before. The irony being this Windows 10 PC is back in the same mini tower chassis albeit with a much lower power motherboard than was the case before, and the last time it was in this chassis was as Windows 10 Enterprise with a volume license key, instead of being the home retail edition as it now is with a license key I have purchased.
So the next step is to reassemble that chassis and then move it to its new location under the desk on the right hand side, ready to go as the occasionally used Windows 10 computer in the household. The server is the next job. Right now all I have is a bare chassis, which has the fittings attached to the base, but it needs to be cleaned inside and out before I start installing stuff into it. It will have 1 TB of disk in RAID-1 for data, a 128 GB SSD for OS and swap, and 16 GB of RAM which will let it run Qgis VMs well for mapping testing.
