Your living in my world now...lol"Trade".                        I start by
opening up the case and cleaning it up and  making sure everything is
connected right.Make note of what is installed in the particular slots and
how many and what type of slots there are.If you have everything needed to
boot them up do so but in a "step by step"procedure".Power it up(hopefully
with no tone) and as it is booting up make notes on the bios string( sure to
need it later! ).Then I use command prompt only to give me an idea of what
is installed and helps see if anything being loaded is corrupted. You can
usualy get there by pressing F8.This also helps you to know what OS is
installed.This also helps guide you to what type of hardware and drivers are
loaded.If command prompt goes well you should make it through boot up. If
you do , and windows is installed go to start, run , and type in HWINFO /UI
and a system diagnose will run allowing you to see current hardware
configurations and drivers installed.At the bottom of the screan there is a
legend to what the colors mean. When it comes to hardware to keep it depends
what you are going to be doing with the machine such as for gamming,office
tasks,web applications and so forth. But a word of advice,newer hardware is
usualy easier to get drivers for so check the dates on the hardware.I hope
this helps and let me know if you need any help finding information on the
hardware, I may already have it...lol

Good luck and have fun.
Robert W. Smith
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