Your husband may well be able to rebuild this computer. However it would be best to ensure that the issue is with the motherboard and not some other component. What if you buy the board for $100 after being absolutely sure it is the same and all the current components are compatible but the computer still does not work. Returning good parts is not an accepted way with computer stores. The chances of finding a 6 year old motherboard are slim at best, current boards will not accept those older parts probably. Somewhere on that board is a model number and revision number to make the search easier. Most importantly you cannot use your current XP operating system so you need to buy another one, another $100 plus gone and for an operating system 2 steps behind the times. Your current XP is tied to the specific motherboard it was installed on with factory built computers. You will need to ensure you either have all the CDs that came with the computer so that all the drivers are available or that you can find them for free online. The processor will need cleaning once removed and it will require Arctic Silver or equal quality paste to re-seat the heatsink on the processor. This bit is the most difficult or frightening apart from deciding on what parts are compatible. Do the math then take a look at today's computers for pricing. Also if hubby feels good about it check components to self build, it can be a very gratifying experience once all the parts are determined and compatible with each other. You likely will only be able to salvage the hard drive from the existing machine if you build new.

I just had to do this on my new HP with Win 8.1. The documentation wasn't as helpful as I expected. It seemed reasonable that the backup routine could have told me exactly how much space I would need, but it didn't. Gee thanks! It turned out to require something like 19 gig. 19 is bigger than 16 (duh), so if you use a memory stick, you would require a 32 gig unit. With dvd discs, you would need four discs. If you attempted to use cd discs, you would need perhaps five times more discs. No one would want to do that. Since you have a new HP, I assume you have HP Support Assistant. It has a section with a Backup instruction and routine to actually perform the backup.

I have been using Linux only as my daily OS for many many years now, I am not a big command line person however I like my GUI! My brain is just not good at retaining all that command line stuff any more but most of the new Linux distros you really don't need it since they have a great GUI. I have used a few distros but my main go to is Mepis Linux, I am currently still on Mepis 8 which I love but will have to upgrade soon to the newest version because they are no longer going to be doing updates for 8. I hate that because I am so happy with what I have now but as DA said we must move forward! I go to the Mepis Lovers forum since it is the main forum supporting Mepis. Very very nice helpful folks there. I have also used Ubuntu, and Gos which was a google version from a few years back that did not go anywhere and is as far as I know defunct. I want to try Linux Mint it is highly recommended as a very easy one to use also. I went with Mephis because honestly everything just works with it, very little fiddling around to get going, and they have built in assistants that are great for helping you if you do have a problem. I recommend trying one of the live CDs of the distro you might want to use and see how it runs on your pc if it runs ok from the live cd it probably will do just fine when installed. You can just use it from the live cd too with out installing it but it will be slower. What I do is not mess with my windows hard drive at all. I have a second hard drive with my Linux installed on it like it is the only one, It is plugged into the mother board so I have 2 hard drives when I boot up I immediately hit to go into boot order and select which hard drive I want to boot to. If I just let it boot normally it boots to the windows drive. I like doing it this way because there is no way you mess up your windows you never touch it. And I can always pull the hard drive and put it in another pc should I care to. There is also WUBI which is a method to install say ubuntu right onto your windows it runs it as it would a program you installed, so if you decided you no longer wanted it you just remove it from your add remove programs. No partitioning to deal with. I have never used WUBI but know people who have and liked it. Welcome to the MEPIS Community the version I have MEPIS Linux 8.0 the new Mepis version MEPIS Linux 11 you can order free live CD of both ubuntu and kbuntu from online. Or you can download and burn an iso file of any Linux distro for free from sources online like distrowatch. I do every single thing I did on my windows computers and probably more using Linux every day. I use firefox as my browser just like I did on windows. You automatically get update notices for your OS just like windows, the main difference is that you do not go download and install programs from various websites, you have a built in resource where pretty much every thing you need is located you just access it and select from the vast array there and it will install it right to your pc. All of these have been well checked prior to being put up for install. Every distro comes preloaded with most of what you will need anyway. the link below is screenshots of various linux distros so you can see what they would look like, some are out dated. Here is a link that might be useful: screenshot directory

Owbist, thanks for the suggestion of a new thread. The computer I am having problems with only has X-P. Due to a problem with my X-P machine, I have put the Ubuntu project on the back burner. Please allow me to tell you about my new problem. X-P SP3, 1024 MB memory. Due to a connection related problem I talked to the folks at ATT. They got me back on line but the computer is very slow, it has not crashed, but it takes forever for the pages to load. Sometimes I type faster than the computer can load the images of the type, and I am a very slow typer. When going from one web page to another is seems like forever. When I try to click back to the former page, also takes a long time. Also, the pages load small and I have to enlarge them, nothing seems to work like it should. I have run Malwarebytes, Ccleaner, Spyware Blaster and defragged the computer...nothing bad showed up. Steve