Please help me fix or upgrade my great-aunt's computer

Factual Questions
1

I am going to be fixing or upgrading my great-aunt’s computer when I visit over Memorial Day weekend, and I could use some advice. She is a relatively rudimentary computer user, surfing Facebook, local newspapers, and cooking sites, sending email via her Verizon account, and listening to old-timey music. She has been using an aging Core 2 Duo that I have been maintaining remotely (I live about six hours away), but it has crapped out with some kind of hardware problem.

Question 1: When she pushes the ON button, apparently the green light comes on for a moment but then quits. No boot at all. Monitor says “no input.” Am I likely to be correct in thinking that either the power supply or the motherboard has died?

Question 2: I am experienced in replacing components, but I’m also capable of spending a few hundred on a new computer if it would give her a better experience overall. Here is what I had in mind; it’s available at the Best Buy near her home. It’s low-end, but I want to stay budget-level because I think it’s sufficient for what she does, and if I were to spend much more than this, she’d insist on reimbursing me, and I don’t want that. For the sort of things she does with it, would this Pentium G2020 computer feel at all faster? Or should I just try to fix the old box?

Question 3: How hard is it likely to be for a timid computer user to change over from Win XP to Win 8? She does not have a lot of “feel” for what she does on the computer and has learned routines for various tasks by rote. I know little about Win 8: Can it be configured with big icons or buttons saying “Internet” and “Email” on whatever is now the desktop or opening screen? Will Internet Explorer look familiar, particularly with something like a Favorites Bar to keep her often-visited sites readily accessible?

Question 4: Any tips for getting her bookmarks, photos, and music off the dead computer? Yes, I should have backed it up more recently, but what’s done is done. I can yank a power supply from a computer in my own home to run the dead one temporarily if that’s the problem. Otherwise, can I take out the hard drive from the old one to put it in the new one; is the motherboard in a new computer like this likely to still have an IDE connection? If all else fails, I can take the hard drive from the old computer home with me and install it in a computer here, and then transfer files back to her, but I’d like to do it all while I’m there if possible.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

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Q1. most likely, yes. Are there any beeps? If so you can Google the pattern (longs/shorts)

Q2. generally speaking, get a new one if you can afford it IMO. Nothing she’s going will require anything high-end, although don’t skimp on memory. Stuff like opening a photo will be faster, yes; surfing the net is mostly limited by her ISP connection bandwidth, not the PC itself.

Q3. I’d go for Win7 rather than Win8 if you can. It’s not hugely different from XP, especially if you disable UAC.

Q4. Sorry, nothing of any real use to offer on this one. There are data recovery services, you can send your disk in and they’ll send you a DVD with what they can get off it.

3

After having struggled through years of phone calls with my 80+ year old mother and her computer issues, I fully agree that staying clear of Windows 8 is the way to go. I believe that Windows 7 will cause much less grief by offering a more gradual learning curve. The older we become, the less we seem to embrace change, especially from unsympathetic software.

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Mind you, my father couldn’t cope with the “changes” between Win95 and WinME … !

5

If its no the HD thats developed a fault its very easy to retrieve things off. Get a caddy/external HD box put in the drive and explore it from a working computer. The only problem might be the HD type, IDE etc.

6

If it is failing without displaying the manufacturer’s screen (Dell, HP, etc.), it is a hardware problem. Remove all the RAM, then reseat them one at a time, testing the boot after each one; if you are lucky, it is just a bad RAM connection, or bad RAM. If that isn’t it, remove and reseat all expansion boards one at a time, testing the boot after each one; could be a loose or defective board.

7

If it is failing without displaying the manufacturer’s screen (Dell, HP, etc.), it is a hardware problem. Remove all the RAM, then reseat them one at a time, testing the boot after each one; if you are lucky, it is just a bad RAM connection, or bad RAM. If that isn’t it, remove and reseat all expansion boards one at a time, testing the boot after each one; could be a loose or defective board.

8

This may not be what you want to hear, but in today’s terms **DO NOT **spend a dime upgrading or fixing a non-new desktop PC. Because of the rise of smartphones & tablets the desktop PC market is in total free-fall. You can buy a nearly new/refurbished box online for next to nothing and they’re only going to continue to get cheaper & cheaper…

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Thanks, folks! All advice welcome.

10

I won’t try to diagnose the old machine, but I think you’ll get more bang for your buck with an AMD APU rather than a dusty Pentium CPU. Here are 2 refurbs in the same price range that use last gen Llano APU’s. These have integrated graphics cores in addition to the CPU logic.

The rig you linked to uses shitty Intel graphics, which probably isn’t an issue for her but it also only has 4gig of ram whereas the refurbs have 8.

It’s not clear which A6 apu those 2 use but here you can compare benchmarks. You’ll note that the A6 is at the bottom in terms of performance but look who it’s up against. You don’t see any Pentiums listed there.

I haven’t migrated to win8 because I know I’m going to have to completely gut the interface before it will be usable for me. I have no intention using the standard MS bullshit. There are ways around it though without going to that extreme. I’ve been keeping a file of articles from PC world for when I get around to it to decide which route I want to take. But short answer, out of the box, it will probably be jarring.

11

I forgot about the data recovery issue. It doesn’t sound like there is a problem with the hard drive. A message like “no input” generally means the machine is either dead in the water or just that the video cable is loose. The latter can happen over time if it was never screwed in just from normal vibrations. It can look connected but if you press on it and retry it should work if that’s the issue. Worst case, pull it off and push it back on. You can also try one of the video cards other outputs. edit: which may require an adapter of some sort.

Assuming no hardware issues with the drive, your best bet is to get an external adapter. Most likely it’s an ide drive if the machine is more than 4 or 5 years old. Here’s what newegg has sorted by user rating.

I wouldn’t bother with an external case unless you plan to use the drive for backups. If so, be sure to get one with a fan. Drives get hot and I’ve never bought into the passive cooling bs. However in that case, it probably best to just mount the drive internally with an IDE-SATA adapter. Just be sure to get the bi-directional kind, not the kind that’s intended for mounting read-only optical drives.

12

I am very qualified to answer this - I spent the better part of a year replacing our companies XP PCs w/ Win 7 PCs (& laptops).

For remote support (which I also do in my job), I wouldn’t screw around with repairing the old one.

Win 8 is NOT like previous ‘experiences’ - there are a few utilities that emulate Win 7 or XP - but if you don’t have W.8, I really recommend you go w/ 7.

Data; though not widely published, it’s easy!
Get an IDE-USB adapter w/ power supply. You don’t need a case for the drive.
Get her user account set-up on the new PC - I recommend she NOT use the admin account, but that’s a professional practice.
Log in as ‘her’.
Connect the old HD. Let windows discover it… Note what Drive letter Windows gives it Open it (in explorer)
{X}:\Documents and Settings{her}\
Select the Favorites folder
Ctrl click to also select the Documents folder
right-click, click copy.
Open “Computer” (another Explorer Window)
Double click C:
Double click Users.
Double click the UserID {her} .
click “Organize” on the toolbar, first tool
click paste.
Yes to overwrite the existing folders
Yes to moving Pictures, Music and Videos to their new folders
Win 7 has sep. folders for docs, pics, music, etc. This auto-sorts them!
Copy all items in the (old) desktop folder
Paste on the new Desktop
Copy any other folders as needed

Your biggest hurdle may be her internet connection - you can’t boot up her current PC to even write down the settings. I hope her ISP is big enough to have support on a holiday weekend. I always use a speaker phone when calling support.

13

Is this a DSL issue? I have Time Warner, and I’ve swapped computers and routers any number of times without having to deal with them at all.