In regards to my hardware, it is a fairly decent one. It is a dell precision T3500 workstation grade PC.
The only thing which is different, than in the most cases is tha fact, that my blockchaindata is on an external USB 2.0 drive.

In regards to my final goal - yes I will transfer BTC out of it as a first step.
But later I will get to a point, where I can get to he BCH etc. forks.

If I can do both with an external wallet like electrum in a safe way, this would be great.
In that case it is sufficient for me to get general idea and order of the steps to take.
I think I will be ablo to research the details myself.

As of the "real guys" :-) I am still waiting for them to find some time to have a look in the log files again.
They got me on track first, but then did not show up again - I hope I did not discourage anybody in some way.