Got Acer eMachines e727 repaired

This is my first laptop which I bought way back in Aug-2010. Thats about seven years now - and over the years it's catastrofically failed twice. Once about three years back it's mainboard died, I got it replaced for about 8000/-. And found out the power brick was dead too. Ok. Another 800/- bucks got me a non-brand Adapter. OK. It worked for a year since, and then one sunny day died again. I bought a Lenovo G405S for about 19000/- rupees and didn't bother to get this one fixed. It stayed in a box up with some junk for a while. A fortnight ago I got the other laptop - a Lenovo G480 which my sister uses now exclusively - repaired for 2200/- because I managed to get it wet and fried. 

So I decided to see if I can get this old Acer Junk repaired. Gave it to the Repair center - the guy quoted 1800/- Rs, I okayed. Got it yesterday, also got an original Acer Adapter for 1550/- Rs too. Don't want to take another chance with no-brand junk. So the laptop is now repaired. Got it home, and watched few movies. The battery is dead incidently, but doesn't matter - I plan to use it for watching movies/tv series etc only. Then I thought of upgrading Ubuntu on it. 

Took me an hour to get the Live USB done correctly -the old versions of Universal USB Installer and Unetbootin I have don't work with Ubuntu 17.04 anymore. So dug around and found Rosa Image Writer - it worked and I went on to install. Turns out the HDD is gone too - multiple bad sectors - the installer crashed. After hacking at it a few times I couldn't get it to work. Thankfully I didn't have any data on it. Funny thing is the SMART Data goes ok. Existing NTFS partition mounts okay. Only when I try to write big amount of data - like in an OS Install - it screams failure. 

Now I said screw it, and just wanted to use the Live USB to watch the Movies. But this laptop being ancient - yeah Seven full years old to date - has only two USB ports. One is taken by Live USB, other by the portable HDD which has the media, and the touchpad is broke, so I don't have a mouse anymore - unless I get a third USB port and connect the wireless KBD/Mouse I have. But no third USB Port and so I'm stuck now. 

Still managed to watch about four movies using the half-broken keyboard only. Still if I want to transfer anything from my Cellphone, which has only MTP - screw Google - I'm stuck since I don't have anywhere to paste these. So now my options are - either get a new HDD for about 3000Rs - or get a USB Hub for 300Rs and continue using the Live USB. I guess I'm going to be getting a USB Hub soon.

Damn, but this sucks!!!