I don't understand the thought process behind cheaping out as much as possible on a terrible PC, then paying for many hours of work from a tech to try to get a pathetic machine to be usable. The correct course of action is to return the faulty machine and buy a better one, rather than throwing away the money on a tech who can really only do so much with such inferior hardware.
It also boggles my mind how, still to this day, it's so hard to get a lower cost desktop or laptop that ships with an SSD, despite the fact that SSDs offer up such a performance improvement that many people consider them mandatory. The average consumer will have a much better experience with a computer that ships with a 128 GB SSD than a 1 TB HDD, yet every manufacturer is offering plenty of the latter (at 5400 rpm no less) and none of the former at sane price points. The two components even have similar costs now. In this era of streaming everything, the average person really isn't using much hard drive space. I know that my non-technical family members certainly aren't.
I just got my mom a $450 refurbished 2012 Dell workstation for common desktop use (mostly email and word processing). She loves it. It's night-and-day faster than the machine it replaced. And the single biggest performance improvement in it comes from, you guessed it, the SSD. A $450 five-year-old used workstation is trouncing any modern desktop in the sub-$1,000 range in practical performance. I would've gotten her a new one, but couldn't find anything in the price range that has an SSD, and the kinds of computers that do ship with SSDs also tend to have unnecessarily upgraded (and costly) processors and graphics cards, which are only useful for gaming.
(Oh, and the used workstation has a Core i7 in it too, so it's not exactly a slouch along any dimension except for 3D graphics performance.)