update...

that worked! I can see the wallet.. the balance... its all there... GREAT news...

now the bad... I do not remember the correct passphrase... I'm wrong on it.

I know I am close... but i dont remember if i capitalized certain words... Ive tried dozens of variable... nothing.

I contacted Dave at walletrecoveryservices... he says give him a few weeks...

in the mean time... what is the best recommendation for me on things I can try here?

I backed up the wallet... several times over.

IN Dec 2015 I downloaded bitcoin core.

I created a wallet... I am 99.9% sure I know the passkey.

It was on a windows laptop, running 8.1

I installed bitcoin core, downloaded about half of the blockchain at that time... never finished.

I sent 2 btc to a wallet i created,  and sat it there. I was playing around and at the time it was not worth a ton, I forgot about it.

Since I gave the laptop to my kid... he went through and deleted a ton of stuff... almost everything... he deleted bitcoin core from the program files...

but he didn't do a restore or anything deep.

I went back and found several files in a folder c:   appdata/roaming/bitcoin

what is there is the following:

3 folders, blocks, chainstate , database
and the following files .lock , db.log  , debug.log  fee_estimates.dat  peers.dat and wallet.dat

as far as I can see, nothing else was deleted or changed.

the original bitcoin core install file is even still in the downloads.

what is the easiest way to go about getting the wallet address so I can get these btc?

should I reinstall bitcoin core on the laptop?

I just backed it all up... and saved those files to another folder and to a external.

I'd love a little $70k influx!

much thanks for any help.

As you explain, please treat me like a 6th grader... I am excellent at following directions, and know my way around a computer fairly well but not a computer programmer or genius by any means.