Computers Are Great ... Until They're Not

Short rant 'cause it's from a Note2 w/ Autocorrects.
We have/had 2 home-built rigs. Somehow, they both died within an hour of each other last Saturday. Hubby's mobo blew 2 capacitors & mine seems to have a bad CPU.
We have the new mobo/CPU combo in his ... but we don't own Win 7, just Win Vista + upgrades. And do you think we can find Win 7 discs? Heck no! And he'll will freeze before we buy 8. But Mobo won't work w/Vista ... and Vista can't get SP1 w/o getting Internet ... and mobo can't get to Interet w/o software installed ...
And it doesn't help that his drive had a broken connection which may have helped cause his problem & when we tried using mine to get his booted, it claims to have a bad driver & blue - screen crashes.
It's been like giant circular cluster ...
we did get a copy of the Win 7 discs from a friend, so we hope to have one rig functional by this evening.

a reply to: ketsuko
When you get multiple breakdowns within a day or two generally it means something caused it.
The most common culprit being an appliance plug being pulled while its still running.
When a plug is pulled on an inductive appliance (anything with an electric motor) while its still running it can send a large spike through the entire house wiring. The damage it can cause is not usualy noticed at the time the plug was pulled, usually the faults show up the following day when the user switches them on.

In my experience the vacum cleaner is the most common cause of damaged electrical goods because the plug often gets pulled when the user pulls the cleaner about the house.

a reply to: ketsuko

Always make sure all computer and TV equipment are plugged into surge-protector power strips. Sounds like a power surge destroyed both computers.

Also, Windows comes with basic networking drivers already included, so there should be no problem getting online after installation.

Get ubuntu.

It's not as user friendly as windows, but at least it's free and runs on damn near any hardware.

Nothing wrong with Window's 8.1 at all. In fact my 8 is set up to look exactly identical to Windows 7 ( I dual boot but not for long ) Windows 8 takes less resources , has a better look and feel , is user friendly way better than Vista. By the way I am a computer professional for over 30 years

I hope it works out for you folks, Windows 7 or bust.....nothing before or after can touch it.
Regards Iwinder

Probably there was some sort of power problem which caused the failure, if you live in an area with a dodgy power supply then its probably best to get a proper UPS that sits between the mains supply and the computer as it'll handle surges and brownouts and also the quality of the PSU is important as well as the cheap ones generally if they fail they can fail in lord knows how many different ways and can nuke motherboards/drives etc as theres no effort being put into what happens should they fail.

We have both on power strips and a backup supply because our area is prone to power outage. So we aren't sure what caused them both to go out a the same time. We did discuss whether or not the backup was going batty. And we may go through and check the surge strips.

Mine had honestly been showing signs of issues for a while. It's not like it's young. We were working off 2009 rigs.

At any rate, we have his going now. Friend's discs got his drive going with Win 7 so the motherboard would talk to it and allow software installation. Then we got the network adaptor on the motherboard working. So we know have one working computer.

Mine is going to take longer. We're putting a heavier duty processor in it, so it'll take longer to get the parts together. My husband can do all the things he does at present on an overclocked dual core. I need a quad core in mine.

As for Op Sys, we'll wait to buy a new set until we see what Win 10 offers. I hear Win 8 is great if you have a laptop, tablet or phone, but it's not so great for desktop and it takes up a ton of space for all of what Win 7 did.