Thanks, I just used their PayPal link to send my support and light my torch!

https://archive.org/donate/

Exactly. After reading through some forums it sounds like BitLocker may have been enabled at the factory initially but I had never noticed and since I didn’t set it up myself I had no key. So anyone reading this and running windows: right click your C: drive and see if BitLocker is enabled. If it’s enabled and you didn’t enable it or don’t have the key then disable the encryption. You can re-enable it afterwords and safely backup your new key so you never find yourself in this situation.

Last week I had the lovely experience of it also pushing a bios update that enabled bitlocker and locked me out of my drive. I had to completely wipe the laptop and lose the data.

Good point, not sure.

The wheel might be passive and that little piece to the right might just be counting clicks.

Nail. Coffin. Good riddance.