Quote Originally Posted by CoventryCat86
So Rubie, I have a Compaq computer that is about four to five years old with a 100GB hard drive. The hard drive is so infested with viruses and spyware that it gives me quite a few error messages when I boot it up and now it no longer connects to the internet or works with my network here at home. I figured I could wipe the hard drive and use the recovery discs and start fresh BUT I really didn't want to lose lots of files (mostly Word and Excel files) so I bought a new 250GB hard drive and figured I'd use the original as a slave or spare hard drive. Well, the goddam thing won't take, I've tried other hard drives and I absolutely cannot get Windows to boot up. We then did wipe the hard drive and tried to reinstall everything from the factory recovedry discs and it STILL won't fuggen work. The guy who was working on it for me thinks the mother board is bad. He swapped out all the cards, changed the hard drive cables, etc.

What do you think or what would you recommend?
With the price of hardware where it is, it could be worthwhile to replace some of your computer's guts. You can probably get a new motherboard/CPU/memory for WAY under $200. Just last month I built out a 64-bit machine for $163 shipped. And I imagine you don't need that much processing power.