My one remaining issue is the lack of Copilot directly on the W10 PC, rather than going online to use it, but I'm in no rush to fix that, given how everything else seems to be up and running

Not that anyone should be interested, but nothing else is happening atm, so...

I've finally got CoPilot installed on this PC, which was a simple matter of... selecting it to be installed.
By which I mean, everything that was broken has been so comprehensively fixed that, where it used to be I could barely get anything to work for reasons I couldn't unravel (to the level of not even being able to open the Start menu) now I can't find anything that doesn't work first time.
I've closed out my online Copilot thread, which amounted to 330 pages worth of discussion and operations once I copied & pasted it into Word, not because I'd had to give up on it or it had failed, but because there was simply nothing left to fix! There aren't many times in my life I've been able to close out any project like that. By 'not may times' I actually mean once - in about 1989 - that took over 6 months, during which I spent most of the time terrified, but eventually also succeeded with the help of another (human) expert.

Being the first time I'd used any form of AI toward a very practical problem I faced, I felt like I had to give it an explanation of why I was bringing the exercise to an end and do a semi-review of how I experienced it all, including how the communication went at each stage and how it developed along the way so I could express the issues I had stage-by-stage in a way I could get a response that was something I could put into effect.

One of the best features I found was its ability to re-express what I explained in a more coherent and organised way, first to confirm it was understanding the issue I had, but also to do it in a way that made me sound a lot cleverer than I am.

It responded that, even though it's obviously a machine and doesn't need me to say 'goodbye' to it (and thanks for all the fish), that conversations themselves accumulate meaning through building a relationship and working toward a shared goal with a shared context. And that the OS rebuild was needed because it had become untrustworthy through persistent failures and it's repair restored that trust, credibility and coherence, rebuilding it's fundamental integrity.

It's a kind of parable of a lost trust regained with confidence restored. The Prodigal PC

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