Old pc does not load windows

[fegsdc]

Hello group, today I turned on one of my father's old Table PCs and I got the following message:

Intel UNDI, PXE-1.0 (build Dev)
Copyright (C) 1997, 1998 Intel Corporation
PXE-E23: BIS initialization failed
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable

Invalid Boot Diskette
Insert BOOT diskette in A:


I would like to open the tower and make some modifications like put a new hard drive of at least 500GBs and also i would like to make it windows 10 as i'm suspecting it is a windows XP PC.
Also I need to buy a keyboard.

Can you please tell me what do I need to buy in order to make it a modern PC (by spending the least amount of money) like cables and parts so that I can do it at home and can you briefly explain me the processes/steps? (Also the prices)

P.s.: I do not know how many GBs there are in the actual tower's hard drive or how many GBs of RAM there are....

 

[Barman58]

The PXE refers to a Network Boot system - Normally used only in Business systems where windows, or anything other than a bootstrap (loader), is not installed locally on the system

The failure to detect media would suggest that there are either no local drives in the case (removed or never present), or they have failed

Unfortunately it is likely that you would need to replace the motherboard and most if not all of the peripheral items (Processor, Memory, graphics Card Etc ... ), to produce a system that would be able to run Windows 10 as a usable system

As an example of the "march of progress" in computing there is a "rule" known as Moore's law that suggests that the power of computers doubles every eighteen Months - applying this to the above system date of 1997 to the start of Windows 10 in 2015 would suggest that the computer processing levels would be almost five thousand times greater (actually 2 to the 12th or 4096) - so the whole system would need to be replaced

 

[Megahertz07]

To fix the old PC would probably cost more than a good used one. Only Win 10 Home will cost around US$ 100. You can find good PCs at ebay.
Dell Optiplex 9030 AiO 23" i5-4590S 256GB SSD 8GB RAM Wifi/BT Webcam Windows 10 | eBay

 

[mmmabear]

You might check some local pawn shops too. I got my Toshiba laptop at a pawn shop. It's not the latest nor fastest, but it serves my needs. I got it for just over $110 because I paid 10% for a 30 day return guarantee. It has been almost 2 years and it still runs fine.

 

[townsbg]

It might help to know the specs or at least the make/model. It's likely though that if it came with XP then it isn't powerful enough to run 10 unless (possibly) it was a very high end computer at the time. Starting with Vista Windows required substantially more resources than XP and earlier. Even then the hardware for the general population really didn't catch up until Windows 7; at least not for cheap. Vista got a bad rap since it required more resources than what was available at the time it was released. Not to go too far down a rabbit hole but at the time so called Vista capable computers with a free upgrade upon release where only powerful enough to run XP and when upgraded to Vista performance was decreased due to lack of resources.

That said it is likely that any computer from that era isn't powerful enough to run 10 even through 10 supposedly requires less resources than 7 but not low enough to work on an xp computer. To get decent performance you will need at least 4 gb of ram and probably a processor upgrade and those only go so far so likely you will also need a different motherboard (as stated), as well as a new processor, and memory. Throw in the cost of a new copy of 10 and you have essentially the cost of a new computer. Anything less than those upgrades and it'll seem like the computer is barely crawling. That's if it came with XP. If it is a 98, me, or 2000 era computer (which the date makes me wonder) then you can absolutely forget about putting 10 on it. Only computers from the Windows 7 era can run 10. We really can't know for sure without knowing the make and model.

 

[fegsdc]

Okay guys thx for the info