is there a free way to set that up? I've literally just been moving an internal drive between computers and using a linux live to add it to the boot with efibootmgr if it has one of those early half uefi mobos

Won't work if you need to update something like dell hardware firmware. DUP wont run in a pe environment. Of course you can extract the files but that doesn't always work. Sometimes you have to boot windows if the manufacturer doesn't bother to make a linux version for a desktop like they do for all their servers.