I am assuming the following process:

• You took the root folder of your Unity Project and copied/moved it into an USB, so no files leftover or lost.
• You plugged that USB into another computer (PC) and then opened Unity and tried to open that same project that worked just fine in your original computer (laptop).

Here are some things that could have gone wrong and how you can asses them:

1. Incompatible Unity version. Make sure that your PC installed Unity version matches your laptop Unity's version. More specifically, the version your project was created with. It should be easy to check in UnityHub.
2. Not installed dependencies. If you had some packages installed in your laptop's Unity, you may have to check if you have them installed in your PC's Unity.
3. You may try to do Assets > Reload all assets.

As for the VS installation problems, I have nothing to add. Good luck with that.

If your Unity project was not that far advanced, you may try to create a new Unity project in your PC and manually migrate your Assets, such as your scripts, your sprites, animations, etc. You may be able to recover most of it, but may have to redo some parts of prefabs or scenes for reference fixing.