The usable-in-theory-only Windows PC we have is giving up the ghost. The PSU seems to have a rising/falling/wailing sound coming from it. Boot-up takes about 2 minutes, and login-to-responsive is another 5~10 minutes. "It's dead, Jim."
My wife's work bought her a new Surface, so no-one has been using this thing anyway, and for a year it's been taking up desk space and waiting for me to deal with it, whenever things get sane after coming back from my Tokyo contract.
I'd performed an execution-by-Linux on a couple people's Macs, just as a method for making certain none of their personal information remained. So I built another bootable USB drive and dropped the latest Ubuntu distro onto it. Trying to get a old Gateway to show its ~BIOS and setup screens is not intuitive. Feels like it's intentionally hidden.
So I find the boot device settings, and go through a dance trying to figure out which of the multiple USB options is the one it thinks my bootable drive is on, only it turns out that the PC can only see the drive about 1:5 times. When it finally lets me choose it, it gets 3/5 through the boot sequence and stops for an hour.
Now I'm just rolling back to Windows 10's Security Reset feature, and letting it delete everything back to "factory" settings.
I wish I was just a little more savvy on bootable drives, to the point where I could make a limited bootable and just fdisk C: and D: like a boss.
