Well recently my motherboard fried, well that was my guess anyway and had tested power supply and hard disk anyway but found it difficult to test the motherboard and cpu myself so I gave it to a little local shop who had a good reputation, based on comments from a couple of my friends.
They confirmed that the motherboard needed replacing and that my ram was "old style", which I knew so they weren't pulling the wool over my eyes so if I replaced one I would need to replace both. Together with labour charges and upgrading I wondered if it would be economical. This shop does "refurb" computers, the whole thing is actually new but may have a mark on the box, the price was very good, beating even the Dell, having 200 gb hard drive and double 512 ram. But they tried to sell it to me on the basis of a Packard Bell.
Packard Bell tend to overload their PC's with failsafe, user friendly features all of which use up loads of RAM.
Yep, I told them that they had just lost the sale since I didn't want all Packard Bell's bells and whistles, I'd seen one in use many years ago and all I wanted was plain XP and customise as I wanted to.
They weren't going to lose a sale, sure enough they removed all trace except for the the start up screen and had it ready for me when I arrived.
Mary, still watching to see what comments are being made on the processes running, although the Start Up has been whittled down just a little.
