[DMcCunney]

And yet another WTF? moment.

My SO decided she needed a new laptop. Easily done. My preferred retailer is the Brooklyn outlet of Cleveland retailer Micro Center. They had a refurbished ex-corporate HP Probook 650 on sale for a decent price. It has a quad core Intel i5 CPU, Intel 4600HD graphics, 8GB RAM, a 56GB SSD as boot drive, and came with Win10 Pro. I spent New Years doing initial setup and recreating her environment. Her needs are modest - email via Gmail, web browsing, craft stuff and DLing and reading eBooks from the NYPL. It's up and running and doing what she needs, so she's happy.

The problem child is the one it replaced. Her older laptop is a Lenovo IP130 model. It was an emergency replacement for an earlier machine. It was also a Micro Center refurb. It came with an AMD A6 CPU at 2.6ghz. (It's a 5 core machine - 2CPU and 3 GPU cores.) It also had onboard Radeon graphics, 4GB RAM, and a 450GB Toshiba SATA HD, with Win10 Home installed. It was adequate, if under powered, for what my SO did, but needed upgrading for me.

An 8GB Crucial RAM module to replace the original 4GB unit came home from MC with the HP machine. I also had a Crucial 24oGB SSD originally procured for the desktop my current one replaced, and I could repurpose it by migrating the OS installation on the IP130 to it.

Lenovos aren't designed for end-user service, so doing the hardware changes required removing the entire bottom panel, secures by a dozen tiny Philips head screws. Okay, where is my jeweler's screwdriver...

My original plan for OS migration was a non-starter. I have a pair of Sabrent USB3 drive enclosures. I wanted to put the Toshiba SATA drive into one, the Crucial SSD into the second, and do the OS migration with both plugged into my desktop. Not possible. The utility I used to do the migration would let me select the drive I wanted to migrate the OS to, but not the drive I was migrating from. Fine. Leave the Toshiba in the IP130, hook up the drive enclosure qith the Crucial SSD to a USB port, and go from there. Once the migration was successful, I could replace the Toshiba drive in the IP100 with the Crucial and boot from it. Took a bit, but done.

With 8GB RAM and booting off an SSD, performance is more or less acceptable. It's still not a really fast machine, but my needs are modest. This will be a travel machine for email and the like once travel is again possible. When traveling, actually using the PC is "if and when", and most of what I do can wait till I am back home at the desktop for completion. Other times, it will be Yet Another Screen when I am helping run virtual events on the tech side. (There is no such thing as enough screen real estate when doing virtual event wrangling.)

Migration and conversion are basically completed, with the programs I'll use installed.

The WTF moment is copying stuff to the laptop from a USB thumb drive. I can run an installer on the thumbdrive from it and install to the laptop. I can open a data file on the thumbdrive with the appropriate program, like graphics viewer, and save a copy from the program to the laptop. I cannot simply copy files across. (A console window appears with a message and goes away, the screen refreshes, but no copy occurs. Event Viewer has listing indicating something lacks needed permissions, but isn't clear what lacks them and what they are.)

My concern was some smaller stand alone utilities that don't come with installers. Just copy the program to where you want it to live and create a shortcut to it. I was able to copy several such things to my GDrive from th desktop, then access GDrive in Firefox, download them, and save them where I wanted them from Firefox. I just couldn't copy them directly, regardless of what they were.

Color me boggled. I haven't seen this behavior before. Everything else here is Win10 Pro or Linux. I don't know if this as a Win10 Home limit that doesn't bite on Pro, or a "security policy" applied by the former owner to keep who knows what from being installed on a company machine. My guess is the latter, but this far I haven't found out what it might be or how to remove it.

At this point it's an annoying itch I can't scratch. The machine is basically reconfigured and usable, and I can use the GDrive work around for other small stand alone programs I might add, but shouldn't have to do that.

If anyone here has seen this before and can tell me how to change that behavior, pointers gratefully accepted and karma donated.
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Dennis