My old PC's toast, right?

[ColinJ]

Yesbut............the system resources needed for W7 are considerably higher than for XP............the old machine may puff a bit ;-))

Linux is not for everybody, but is able to extend the usable life of old hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Linux_distribution

I suppose it depends how old. My laptop was from 2008 and it works fine with the Win 7 upgrade, but no doubt that was helped by me replacing the HDD with an SSD.

 

[swee'pea99]

Update: I replaced the CMOS battery, but still no joy . Still, having ruled that out, I had a closer look at the hard drives, one of which was being a bit noisy. I unplugged it from the wide ribbon cable, and plugged t'other directly into the motherboard (rather than via HD#1) and bingo! It started up no problem. Scanned, cleaned, de-fragged, de-malwared and now waiting for the word from my sis as to when she wants it delivered. So thanks all - another basically perfectly good bit o' kit saved from landfill.