Computer died. Can you confirm it's a virus, and what to do with info on the hard drive?

Old Dell Inspiron running WinME. It always crashes after a couple of days, but this morning's crash was extra special. Just about every piece of hardware was not recognized and the system tried to find software. The monitor view now has only 16 colors in the huge-icon view, IE won't start, Norton Antivirus won't start and can't be reloaded, no sound, etc.

In safe mode, I can get into AOL, but I can't check any free software because my JAVA has been disabled and ActiveX controls can't be downloaded either.

I assume that a virus has effectively killed my [already junk] computer. Please confirm.

What's the danger of saving programs and documents from the hard drive and putting them on another computer (I plan to scan them before they're run on the second computer)? Can I just buy an external hard drive, have everything saved on that hard drive, and then--if nothing shows up--transfer everything to the new computer?

Thanks for any advice.

Computer died. Can you confirm it's a virus, and what to do with info on the hard drive?virus removal

you can try and get your data off with an external h/d, just make sure you scan the data (on a different computer), before you take it off or use it on the newer comp. you could also try taking your h/d out of your comp and installing in a different comp as a slave and see if you can retrieve your data that way. although, if you are actually able to see your data, i'd run scans, before you pull it off.