My Aunty has an Acer Aspire V3-571G-6602 laptop that originally had Windows 7 Home on it. Then Microsoft decided she should upgrade to Windows 10, all without asking her. Her machine was slow on the reboot and looked locked up. The auto upgrade to Windows 10 and the subsequent auto upgrades persuaded her that this was not kosher, but simply wrong. I lent her an older Lubuntu system, 12 years old, while I deciphered her predicament, and she started to really like the simplicity and speed of Ubuntu. Really, she only uses a browser.
Little Weed’s neighbourhood friend has an Acer Aspire 5742z-4403 that was not functional. It would simply continue to cycle the boot process. He had suspected that his hard disk was bad but did not know how to prove it. I had him bring it to our house. in the end I proved that his hard disk was defective, the machine did boot up with Ubuntu and was fully functional. After connecting to the network with an RJ45, with Firefox we verified the internet worked. Summary: The computer works fine, the hard disk needs replacement.