No operating system OS Vista

It sounds like the hard drive(s) died. You can change them, but you need a SATA I/II/III compatible SSD for this since it’s old enough to be from when laptops were still SATA I. I had to do a data recovery on one of the nVidia ones and they use SATA I drives, so I think these lack the SATA II BIOS Option ROM - if they even support SATA II.

Personally I wouldn’t bother repairing it and I’d advise a client to do the same - these are 10+ years old, HP has pulled the drivers and the nVidia GPU is known to fail - I’m surprised it went this long unless you have the rare GMA one that actually held up. In addition to that, the parts cost will exceed the parts only value of the laptop and we’ve had 10 years to move past the Core 2 series.

Treat yourself to a used Haswell, Broadwell or Skylane business laptop from Dell or Lenovo - just make sure you transfer the ownership with the Dell system. You’ve had this long enough it’s time to upgrade.

However, if you’d like to repair it as a beater you can have die for no reason without warning, get a used 128GB SSD that’s old enough to support SATA I and install a lightweight Linux distro. Just don’t rely on it as it’s known to fail. The guide can be found here.