Sorry for the newbie-sounding question - but my desptop seems to have died. I don't think it's a hard-disk problem, though it may be. Anyway, I don't mind buying a new tower but don't want to lose what's on the hard disks (it has two 250gb disks). If I buy a new tower then it is easy to get it to read these two hard disks (assuming that they are not corrupt)? Years ago when I changed desktops I think I could attach an old hard disk as a slave with a ribbon thing when I opened up the casing, but I'm not sure. Any help would be great.

This shouldn't be a problem. Just make sure that your new motherboard has an IDE/PATA (the ribbon) port on it.

If its a SATA drive you don't have to set any jumpers to save or do jack sh*t! I love serial ATA drives. If its a parallel ATA drive (big 40 pin ribbon connection). You just change the little plastic piece to the slave position (if your other drive is on master) and it will read the drive. I'm sure that BOTH the 250GB drives are not bad! Also if you don't want to fiddle with jumpers, unplug the 40pin cable from the dvd/cd drive and plug it in the hard disk with power. it can lay on the inside of the case or on a book but sit it on an anti static bag and NOT a metal surface!

CD

Thanks. I'll see if I can get a tower with an extra slot so I can use one of the hard disks as a slave permanently, though I dare say the darn thing may fall apart when I try to take the casing off.

Describe "died". You probably don't need a new desktop.

Well, the first thing that happened is that lots of red lines appeared on the screen, then it froze. Since then, I usually can't even get to the stage of seeing text on the screen when it boots up - and when I do there are random looking charcters all over the screen...and then it cuts out from the monitor ("no signal received"). It would even be hard to get to the stage where I ask it to boot from a CD.

I guess these things are often the hard disk, but it sounds like the motherboard maybe. I'm a million miles from being an expert so if I can get a new high powered tower and not lose data I don't mind spending the doughnuts, especially as I could get a better graphics card and play videos from my HD camcorder. The question I have is what to do with my poor old desktop?

Yank out your hard drives and put them in your new computer. You can give away the old machine to charity or offer it up for free on craigslist.

Pull the hard drives and see what happens when you turn the machine on. You can also get an External Hard Drive enclosure if you need something off the hard drives.

I'm gonna have to yank them out so I may as well try this. What should happen? I can't imagine what should happen to a PC without any hard drive!

It should just come on and not find a hard drive. It is one way to see if the computer still works. The description you are giving kind of describes what happens when a heatsink fan goes out and the CPU burns up. On some computers the computer will not even come on without a hard drive plugged in. But that was mainly older computers.

Now you come to mention it, it does sound like the CPU may have frizzled a bit. But, one in every 30 times I press reboot I do get to the desktop - but then I get funny random looking lines in the screen and a freeze within 2 minutes. It's not that old so I'll see what it does when I yank out the hard disks.