So my desktop computer died, stripped out the power unit, bench tested it and it's a gonner, bought a new one off Ebay fitted it but the computer fires up but no video output, diagnosis suggests it's either the graphics card or the motherboard, or maybe both.
So as it's a self build from ten or twelve years ago I decide to buy a replacement.
Find a supplier offering HP desktop with Win 10 pro and Intel i5 cpu (refurbished, tested and ready to go 'out of the box') for £109.
Go for that, it arrives quickly, it doesn't work, contact the seller, he doesn't respond, send him another message saying I'm going to cancel and return, he comes on the phone within 5 minutes, apologises and suggests that I return it and he will fix it and send it back, he will pay the return costs, then suggests that he will first send me a Win 10 pro disk to try to reinstall the OS.
So the disk arrives but the computer won't let it install, keeps going to 'automatic repair' then tells me it can't do that and goes into a loop doing the same over and again.
Call the guy on the phone spend half an hour with him saying try this. and that , no joy so it's back in the box waiting for the Hermes lady to pick I up on Monday.
In the meantime I'm fixing up a Dell laptop for a friend whose 84th birthday is tomorrow, it was on Win7 but I managed to get a free upgrade to Win10, ok but it kept popping up a message box saying "Cortana is not available in the UK at the moment", so often that it rendered the pc damn near useless, so after consulting google found the only way to stop it was to kill off Cortana in the registry.
Job done and delivered...……... but I've got a headache