Replies

You really did not help much. Many machines do not allow UEFI turn off (which MS really suggests). ASUS machines and motherboards are notorious for this. Try booting 7 on them. You should have a separate article about what to machines and motherboards are not 7 friendly.

I would consider changing the battery, I had weird start up issues on an old machine till I did that.

If you can afford $220 right now you can get what will probably be a very dependable Windows 7 Pro system with everything you need and then some. Joy Systems is a certified refurbished computer reseller. It’s got USB 2.0 ports and everything! Check out these links if you have a notion; link one, link two, link three. These are specifically chosen for the Core2Duo processor running at 3 or more Ghz, and 4 gigs of RAM.
Anything less and you get something running slower or hotter and anything more doesn’t give as much bang for the buck and I’ve found them to be very reliable, though often scratched a bit here and there.

If you decided to go that route and don’t have a network setup, you’d probably have to get an additional $20 IDE to USB cable to attach and copy data from your current drive to the new to you system but then you could also keep that drive as your backup drive if you don’t have anything to back up to now.

All of your pointers go to Rakuten, used to be buy.com. They have a serious issue with credit card fraud

SD USERS REPORTING CREDIT CARD FRAUD VIA RAKUTEN SHOPPING SITE: 312

Have a great day, all of the systems are about double the price of ebay.

Sorry, MT Minitower

Remember to use a ups if you put in an SSD
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/03/01/224257/how-power-failures-corrupt-flash-ssd-data

SSDs do very poorly in power loss.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/03/01/224257/how-power-failures-corrupt-flash-ssd-data

American Express will next day your new card. I do not know of others that give this service.

You may have failing capacitors, if so it will get worse. This is how my monitor slowly died.

I just looked at my Win7 Dell quad and it has 119 processes. Why on earth would you recommend Windows 8, I have been testing it and I hate it. Opinions differ but 7 is a very good operating system, so is XP for that matter.

Back it up ASAP. If you are getting more and more bad sectors back it up and install a new one.

This is another way that printer manufacturers are screwing you, I now use third party ink carts.

I would get rid of Norton Internet Security. I would bet that if you did a clean install you would run fast enough. If you are looking at a new machine, an I5 class would be great. Your machine has a passmark of about 3000, an I5 would be about 6000. I believe you have a lot of software to clean up. Also, if you have not already, you can get the MS file converters so you can deal with Docx and XLSx.

I never purchase refurbished hard drives and I tend to avoid refurbished components altogether ever since my very first
computer was a refurbished unit. (Compaq Presario~Best Buy)

I had one of those, it overheated.

Be careful with using compressed air, if you hit the fan it can overspin and damage the magnets.