Computer trouble

I'm having computer trouble. My plan was to replace my PC with a new sometime in January (X-Plane 10 would likely require it and by then other people would have experience of what hardware gives what performance), but now it doesn't want to start every day and the motherboard's network interface is totally busted.
As a quick fix, I've installed a small, cheap PC; Windows 7 messes up things as some old applications won't run and I don't understand why I can't backup to the USB disk anymore (has something to do with permissions) and its video card can't use three screens. And of course it's probably not good for X-Plane although I've not tried to install it yet. On top of that it might be it which only gives me a 0.4 Mb/s internet connection -- or I have another problem which just happened to surface in the period without network connectivity.
Good idea I had last year that an Ipad might be a good backup for situations like this. But there probably won't be many updates to this blog for a while.