Alright, my sister had a few friends over from college last Saturday. One of them plugged in their jump drive and I guess the computer just died (I wasn't here at the time so I don't know exactly what it did.) I thought it was the power supply because the was no power to anything, but my brother happened to be in town the next day and said he could look at it (he is also the person that built the computer.) He looked at the front USB ports and found it was missing the little plastic piece that keeps it so you can only put devices in one way. He un plugged the USB ports from the motherboard and it fired right up, however no output to the monitor. He said that usually when that happens it fries the motherboard. He said since the computer is 3.5 years old and other things were starting to go bad, it was not really worth fixing for our main computer. He also said for the price and the fact we could not wait too long for a new computer, he told us it was our best bet to just buy one off the shelf. He found an HP Pavilion with the Pentium Dual Core processor, 2gb of memory, 500gb hard drive, and Windows Vista home premium for $430 shipped to our door from Office Depot. We got it Wednesday, I hooked it up and got it up and running and I loved it up until today. I tried using the lightscribe program and when I got to the last step everything went to not responding including all of my Firefox windows. I finally was able to close all of them and then tried to restart Firefox, but when you clicked on it nothing happened. So, I reset the computer and it would not boot up. I reset it again and it automatically went into "Start Up Repair". When it was done everything seemed to work right, but everything I have done in the past 2 days was back to default settings and programs I installed such as Lime wire and windows live messenger were gone [:@] It also seems a bit sluggish now too, not like it did the first few days. Really sorry for the long read guys, but does anyone have any advice?


Also, I figured I should ask this instead of starting a new thread also. I have been messing with the old computer, I figured I can get a used motherboard and set it up in my room. I took everything apart and cleaned it, then put it all back together. You press the power button, it turns on, all fans, hard drive, cd drive, etc. but after about 10 seconds it shuts off. Before I took it apart it would run as long as you wanted it to but just no output to the monitor. Does this just sound like the problem in the motherboard got worse? Btw, does anyone have an extra, good working mother board for a full size case that is compatible with the AMD Athalon XP processor? If so I might be interested. It currently has an Albatron XP 2. Thanks!

And yes, I am not the most knowledgeable with computers, but I am learning!