Hi there,

I&rsquo;m afraid I may have to dampen your expectations here. These days, the Windows license key (at least the OEM ones, meaning those that are imposed on you when you buy hardware) is usually tied to the hardware, i.e. the BIOS or whatever chip. I don&rsquo;t think It will be accepted inside a VM.

Your best use for the drive would be to pop it into an external case and use it as mobile storage or as a backup drive. (Or leave it bare if you have a hot-swap adapter) That&rsquo;s what I did with the HDD that came in my Thinkpad. When that arrived 5 years ago, I only did a short boot-up because I was curious about Windows 10. So I had my first (and for many years only) contact with that. I then swapped the drive out for a 3rd party SSD (also from Crucial) straight away.

Regarding your RAM peculiarity, I&rsquo;m not sure but it sounds like those missing 2 GB are siphoned off for the internal graphics.