Might be time for a new computer

[AcidFlashGordon]

Be very careful with HP. Bought one for my wife a few years back. It died a week after the warranty expired. Tried to get a new motherboard, but kept getting the runaround from HP. Finally got one of their techs on the phone who told me I could order the part from their supplier, Emachines. If I'd wanted an Emachine, I would have ordered one and saved a couple of hundred off the price of the stinking HP!!!

Better to build your own or have someone tech-savvy do it for you.

I had the opposite experience with HP. 2 years ago I bought an m9080n quad-core machine with a 1 TB hard drive and GeForce 8800 video card (unfortunately it's double the price that country_boy has to spend). The only problem I had was after installing an external wifi antenna adapter (which was a POS) I unstalled the external adapter software...which screwed up the existing HP software. Called their customer service and was directed to their online service site. Within 1 hour of logging on, my software problem was corrected and the "original" wifi software was up to date (although by this time I had Clearwire wireless service through my LAN card).

 

[smschulz]

Old quad core DDR3 computers are pretty cheap, and getting cheaper now that the AMD 6-cores are starting to hit the market.

Prices delcine as it is the nature of the technology business.
Q Cores are going down as the tic-toc (Intel's term for new model intros) of business goes on.
The New 2010 Intel CPU line up is in and the old must go.
It has nothing to do with the irrelevant offerings of AMD.

 

[jsimmons]

You can build a fairly stout system for about $300 - motherboard, cpu, memory and case (with power supply). Most motherboards nowadays come with fairly powerful video cards built on, but I would probably spend a little extra money if gaming was a concern.