It sounds like you had 2 legacy PATA drives in a master/slave configuration, and the technician upgraded them to newer SATA drives without consulting you first. The new SATA drives should perform better, but if your wife can't complete her writing, the technician should return and get the PC up and running again.
The article below explains the difference between PATA and SATA:
[link|https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/difference-between-pata-and-sata/|Difference Between PATA and SATA - GeeksforGeeks|new_window=true]