Bernie you can indeed change the boot order in the BIOS, remember to press F10 when you exit to save the settings. After you can return to the BIOS and reset it to the original drive if you wish. Your video card is likely built into the motherboard, very few mass produced computers have separate video cards now. If you have access to a monitor there should be a spot to connect it to the computer to verify that the video card is working or not. You might Google 'video card stability test' and select a program to download and test the card, there are plenty of them out there. You mention that the problem computer is old. Perhaps the vents and fan are bunged up with dust bunnies creating a heat issue? Have you tried clearing this out? If you made note of the hard drive you could visit the manufacturers site and run some tests on it perhaps.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Raven and Owbist, I am so grateful to you. It seems I am safe using the screws for the hard drive bay that I already used. Raven - they are the ones in the first link. Owbist - I pilfered the only screw from my old Dell desktop that looked like the right kind. I only found one screw that seemed to match - I'm not certain what it was holding in - perhaps the power source or fan. At any rate, I think I best replace that before I might ever try to start that old computer up. I don't believe it had a floppy drive - or I'd be happy to remove it (it had just a cd drive). The case is fairly secure for now - but I'd feel better securing it completely - if the cleaning woman bumps the vacuum against it - or my daughter roots around there for a lost ball or toy, it might accidentally open. There's no urgency there, but I'd rather get it taken care of. I suppose I could open the tower again - and take out one of the screws - and match it at a store that builds computer parts. But if I don't have to, I'd rather not power everything down and unhook it. If the hard drive seems securing screwed in (and no part of the screw is protuding), can I safely assume it's fine - and just worry about replacing the case screws. that would be easier. I wish I'd come here first - and saved myself some aggravation. not a single person at Dell was able to give me this information - even though they had all the information you guys did. I truly don't want to have to buy from them again. They were similarly inept when I wanted to add a firewire port last summer. They have a front slot for it - but nobody had the right part numbers. Luckily the Dell forum was filled with trials and tribulations of others who'd attempted this - with no consistent accurate answers from Dell. At least someone there provided the necessary parts - in fact, when I ordered what Dell insisted was all I needed, it was only 1/2 of what I needed. Soon my daughter will be ready for a new desktop. Is there a company to buy them from with good reliability and quality and good technical/customer support? Should I just have one built from a computer place that builds computers? that purchase is likely to be in 2010. Thank you again. Lynn.

I'm back and searching for a good, reliable hard drive enclosure that has esata connection (for faster data transfer). I didn't realize that the drives we discussed above were only USB transfer. I had bought the Nexstar CX: http://www.amazon.com/gp/cart/view-upsell.html?ie=UTF8&HUCT=2&newItems=U35WX1CZO87WNR%2C1 But when I went to set it up, discovered that it is only USB connection. I didn't realize that by sata they meant the hard drive type - not how the external drive would connect to my pc. So now I'm still looking for a reliable hard drive enclosure - with esata connection (and actually, one with usb and esata would be great). Thanks. Lynn.

Now even I had to look up an acronym - SIL. ;-) Ok, so you have MS Works XLR & WPS files. The problems you are having - or going to have - is that Works is old, and the Office XP Pro your SIL gave you is also old, being actually Office 2002, version 10 of Office. If you don't have too many files, I think your best bet is to try an online file converter. Zamzar claims to be able to open and convert Works files. http://www.zamzar.com/ Save : XLR (spreadsheet) files to xlsx WPS (word) files to docx If you don't want to buy a new version of MS Office, try installing LibreOffice - the newer version of OpenOffice - and it will open xlsx and docx files [ If you want to stick with your SIL's MS Office XP Pro, then convert those files to xls & doc files, respectively. That version of Office is very old though. ] There are other ways of handling this, but probably if you you're going to try anything else, your best bet would be buy MS Works off Ebay or Amazon for $10 or so, open and convert all the files. Btw, you can't even open a .doc file in Office XP Pro ?? That's not a good sign - probably a sign of corruption. Btw #2 - When you say you can't open files, I take it they are on your current hard drive, and not within some compressed backup folder. That is, not within a zip file or the like. Re your backup cds : Can you load one of them, then rummage around in their files and tell us what you find ? (as in, names of files and extensions ?) Most likely they are proprietary formats, but if we know what they are, we could perhaps tell you how to retrieve them. Last, anyway you can get the hard drive back from the repair service ? Probably not, but it would be a second source of backup files. Let us know how it all works out.