Friends pc knackered please help?

[wilson1973]

My mates pc is knackered im thinking the best thing to do will load a copy of ubuntu on to it to wipe xp,as the xp will no longer work and probably isnt even licensed she has no back up discs etc.She is happy for her pc to be wiped but has lots of documents on it in ms word that she needs to college im not sure about the best way to save these but ti though if she could burn them to a cd maybe she would be able to open them if she downloads openoffice after installing ubuntu,but im not sure if it would recognise the word documents,can anyone help

 

[Mr soft]

desktop or laptop?

Is the drive partitioned . ie> C drive windows , D drive all your friends files?

 

[wilson1973]

I havent looked to deeply into it suffice to say its just all jammed up its got loads of rubbish in there i was hoping to get round there this week and try to get the docs out and copied,with regards to your post concerning partition etc,could you enlighten me,i can then see how she has things configured at her end.
Regards Alan

also its a desktop

 

[Mr soft]

See if your friend can get into windows. The pc might just need a spring clean. Have you tried a hard drive defrag, ccleaner , spybot , virus scan type of thing . A lot of users just don't tidy their machine .

For the partition info , just go to control panel, admin tools,computer management, disk manager, and you will see how many physical drives you have, and if those drives have partitions, and how many.

If all is no good (ie, you can't boot into windows) you can always take the hard drive out and plug it into another pc .
I would virus scan the drive first before copying any files to another drive.

I can't help with the Ubuntu bit or open office.