u/Worried_Party_7588

Title. Its a very basic HP Pavillion but when I booted it up recently for the first tike in years it doesnt seem to even be able to do basic tasks very well at all, like browsing files or opening programs. It has 4 GB RAM, 750 GB hard drive, 100 GB used. I remember it used to be able to go crazy on Halo custom edition, (at 640x480 of course...) AOE2, GBA emulators, Minecraft, and TES3 MP. It for some reason had a log file that was 400GB but I deleted that, Disc Cleanup didnt do it so I had to do it manually. I know this computer was always and will always be slow but what can I do to make it more functional? Im thinking throw more RAM in it and do a clean Windows 7 install. Idk what the other components do, I just know that more memory = more resources to do stuff = faster

Ive been trying to boot up my old desktop windows XP computer. My monitor gives the whole "running in power saving mode" because it doesnt connect to the computer consistently, though I got it to do it once and it worked fine until I restarted.

Monitor works just fine with my other windows 7 computer. Any ideas? Im not especially knowledgeable on this stuff but I can only guess its something wrong with the Compaq computer, since it has no issues on other computers.

My guesses are maybe a virus broke something on the software side, maybe a driver that allows monitor usage, and perhaps thats why it got retired 20 years ago. Or it could be hardware side, perhaps on the 15 pin connecting port.