Dead Motherboard and what to do?

[Kenex7]

Hello all. My HP Pavilion desktop (HP 500-147c) has a dead motherboard. I had it checked out at Office Depot and another computer repair shop and both confirmed the death of the motherboard.  I bought it refurbished from Walmart.  I don't remember doing anything different on the computer for the board to die...I never touch the insides of it ever...don't know anything about that kind of stuff.  When bought it had widows 8.1 on it 64 bit and I upgraded it for free to Widows 10 also 64 bit.

It is a core I-5 with 12 gigs ram and a very nice computer. The people at office depot told me that it woud be cheaper to buy a new computer rather than have my broken one fixed.

Do I just have to let it go to scrap? What a waste that is of my computer and my money. It has a Joshua-H61-uATX motherboard in it.

 Anyway, If I could get a new motherboard put in I will have to buy Windows 10 new again from a store again won't I?

The hard drive has some important stuff on it that I cannot recover now.

Any advice on saving the computer would be most welcome..or will I have to hold a funeral serivice it?

Thanks

Ken

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@Kenex7

Sorry, but I don't have very good news for you ...

It's very unlikely that you would even be able to find a reputable repair place that can repair a motherboard -- and even then, that would easily cost more than replacing it.

Also, according to the HP product page for this PC, it came with Win8 preinstalled, not Win10.  That means is was Upgraded to Win10 and the license is attached to that motherboard.  The Win10 Upgrades are only good for the "life of the device", and MS considers the motherboard to be the "device".  So, a new motherboard will require a new license.

You don't require that motherboard to recover files from the hard drive; you just require a working PC.  You can remove the drive from this PC, purchase an external drive connector like the one shown below, use that to connect the drive to a working PC and copy off the file you want to save:

Good Luck

[Kenex7]

Many thanks WAWood.

Heck, what do I do  with the old nice Pavilion?...the shell and  insides I mean.  I suppose I should keep the RAM and the Hard Drive but is there anything else I could keep and use somewhere else?

Thanks for the tip about how I can save the stuff off the old hard drive.

I did buy a second hand HP Pavilion HPE with core I-7 and 16 gigs Ram off eBay.

It is however old and has Windows 7 Pro on it...and here is the bad news about this computer...it won't update windows 7 Pro. When I try to update it it just runs all night without ever doing anything.

I am a bit ignorant when it comes to computers and I am old so I hate all these problems.

Ken