Okay, I'm back from the computer place in the big city.
Rather than taking this tower in to get the USB ports on the back replaced--I'll do that next week--I instead took in the old computer, to see if something could be done with it, as I'd been told it was probably something very minor.
The guy didn't even run a diagnostics test on it; he opened the case, saw something, pointed it out to me, and said "no good," not worth repairing.
He told me what it was, but damn, I wasn't "grasping" very well at all.
There's three pins, posts, stakes, whatever, inside that have cone-type tops.
Or rather, they're supposed to be cone-type tops.
Over time, these cone-type tops flattened down.
He was able to get into the computer, though (I hadn't been), and retrieve thousands of photographs, transferring them to a compact disc. I told him to junk the computer. It cost $20 total.
I'm happy; I got the photographs yanked out of there.