

Not a mistake, I’ve got an ender 3 and a cr10. Both are fine, keep your expectations realistic and calibrate each axis, especially the extruders. Use PLA, consider getting a new build plate if your prints won’t stick. I recommend flashing firmware on the ender 3 unless you know what was loaded onto it last, doesn’t have to be fancy firmware just something you know for sure is configured for your printer. A cr10 should probably get firmware as well but I never loaded new firmware on mine and the controller is older so I’m not sure if it’s a good idea.
Don’t forget the cost of filament, if you print a lot you may spend more on filament in a year that your printer budget.






I’m sure windows activation will complain, but you should be able to dd your windows partition (or disk) over to the external disk, set up a bootloader (windows can do this, but something like grub or syslinux I know would work to hand off to the windows bootloader)
I don’t know anything about bitlocker stuff, probably needs to be decrypted before this can work.
That’s what I would try, even though it’s not wrapped up in a single tool.