OT, but this seems like the place for help.

To PCs have died on me in the last few years, and it's getting expensive, because I don't have any tech savvy friends to call on. First time it was the hard drive, and once you start replacing a hard drive that's a couple of years old you might as well upgrade lots of other bits as well.

So I got a new machine (non-branded, but many of the components seem to be the same as are used in major brands) and it ran reasonably OK for a year or so, but it takes literally hours to defragment even though I hardly ever use it. Admittedly when my daughters are home they spend hours at it and download God knows what, possibly including stuff which alters the configuration without either them or me knowing it. When I try to run defrag, it carries on for a while, then stops, screen saver switches on and I have to move the mouse to get it to resume defragmenting manually. So I have to spend a couple of hours at the machine any time I want to defrag. Should I change defrag preferences or something?

Recently, when I switched on I got a message "keyboard error or no keyboard found", and that's when I had to call in professional help. The techincian spent quite a while working on it, then concluded I needed a new motherboard.

Ouch. Pay the money and hope for a great new life. But it's still painfully slow downloading from the internet, though this may be because my service provider, which was taken over by the Belgian phone network a few years ago, is pushing ADSL (hope I'm not dyxlexixc?) and may be cynically disimproving the narrowband service to encourage people like me to take the right decision. Or could it be due to a virus?

The wiring in my house is different from what I was used to in Ireland. I have noticed that there's an awful lot of static in the exposed metal chassis parts of appliances generally, including some computer components (especially the scanner, which sparks when I connect the data lead to it). I suspect that there may be no earth lead in the socket which I use, even though it is a three-point one. Could a build-up of static be damaging my PCs? If so, should I try taking a lead from the chassis of the PC to a radiator? Waaaaugh!