theoldwizard1 wrote:
WITHOUT ! During a Black Friday sale I bought a USB 3 CD/DVD for about $30. You might have to tweak the BIOS to tell it to look there first if you are boot from it (recovery).
If you are going to try and fix the old one, now is a good time to upgrade from an "hard disk" (HDD) to a "solid state" (SSD) one. If you do two, things to watch for.
"You get what you pay for !" Pay the extra for a "professional" version. They have a better warranty. (Most new equipment does NOT come with the "professional" SSD.)
"Bigger is NOT better !" Unless you really need it, don't spend the money on a 1TB drive. 500MB is fine and with a bit of "conservation" 256MB is more than adequate.
Also, if you are buying new, you want an IPS display. MUCH better quality than any other type of LCD display available.
Win7 tower purchased 5-6 years ago. i use a 512mb SSD for my ‘C’ drive...just the OS and software thar doesn’t offer an option for custom install. then two 1-tb hard drives partitioned into programs, data files, music, photos and videos. all are image backed up on a series of external drives as well as the cloud.