My mom was just given a used computer, and I'm having trouble resetting it

[Tuuvi]

My mom's cousin just gave her one of her old desktops, a Dell running Windows Vista Home Basic. She said she deleted all of her old files, user accounts, etc. before giving it to my mom but Windows says the hard drive only has 9 GB left on it. There are no programs to uninstall under add/remove programs and only a few folders and files that can be deleted.

I decided to factory reset the computer, but when I try to go into repair mode I get a blue screen of death with stop code 0X0000008E (0XC0000005, 0X82A76367, 0X9CFE091C, 0X00000000).

I want to get all the old junk off of the computer so it will be like new, but I'm having trouble doing a factory reset and I can't access any of the old files or programs. What should I do?

[HopAlongBunny]

All I can do is highlight the obvious.
Do you have Admin access?
Have you checked the box for show/hide files?

Sorry I can't offer much else...but I do remember a mechanic who saved my butt with the comment: "Are you sure your car is in park?"

[Xiahou]

Do you have the System Restore discs?

[Tuuvi]

Do you have the System Restore discs?

I'm afraid not. She said she would give them to us but that's probably not going to happen.

[Lemur]

Have you considered converting it into a Linux box? It's a good solution for older, difficult-to-support hardware.

You can even bring quite a few of your Steam titles over ...

If you gave us the exact model number we could probably give you a decent idea of what would run on it.

[drone]

Do you at least have the activation key? It might be on a sticker attached to the computer. With that, you should be able to use a standard Vista disc to build it from scratch.

Depending on what it will be used for, going to Linux might be the way to go here.