I agree with JAFO. Salvage your dvd' power supply' case' hard drives' videocard unless you want to update it.

What Jafo said.

Those specs sound ancient... I'd build a new one from scratch. If you don't do heavy gaming, you could easily throw together an econ build for $300-360 without using low build quality parts.

Electrical sounds are indeed very bad.

Yet, I dont think that you should throw away stuff that does still work fine.

That does not mean you have to dump them before they fail. Newer drives dont offer much about older ones, too.

I also want to point out, that those drives can live for 10 years and more, especially if not used 8 hours a day, which is rare.

It is usually a good idea to buy quality power supply instead of dirt cheap ones.

Also in your case, make sure that it is NOT your PSU who caused electric trouble... and if in doubt.... remove it.

I would not go to high in wattage.... with most PC hardware getting much more energy efficient, you rarely will need an owerpowered PSU.

It is nice if you have money to burn, but personally I would not use a 60 - 100 € case as a trash can.

You know you can clean fans with pressurized air?

Also make sure that your CPU and GPU are a match.... respectivly find out what is slowing down your system and consider replacing that first.

Or make sure that should you go to buy your new high end graphic card, that your processor is up to the task feeding it.

Never trow away storage space..... you will need it in time, believe me.

Better invest in backup storage..... yes... even a 2 week old hard disk or SSD can fail fataly.

As for SSDs, they are awesome for speed, but they are still much more expensive than hard disk drives of similar capacity. And while they dont have any mechanical parts who wear, the memory itself does wear with every write to it. The implemented wear leveling algorithm does mitigate drive encryption, although that of course may be of no concern for you.

Generally speaking, it is of course awesome to buy or build a brand new rig with the latest and best hardware available. Doing so however means that you will burn a lot of money in the process.... for perfomance that will be topped by medium range systems 6 month later for half the cost.

If you can spare that money, awesome. If not.... consider upgrading only CPU, RAM and maybe graphic card, depending on what is the bottleneck.

Usually the medium price range offers to best long term deal.... you dont pay the premium "Must have that now" price but also avoid the low end "upgrade every 6 month because your upgrade gets to slow within that time frame".

And get rid of Vista... it transforms 4 Ghz Quad Cores into 500 Mhz pentium IIIs with 64 MB of RAM.

replace ALL hw as hdds/odds from 4 years ago were mostly IDE and most if not all CURRENT mobo's are SATA only,

regarding the PSU I work to the theory (based upon experience) that unless overspeced(by capacity) (at least 2x the system draw of ALL components) have a life of approx 3-5 years as the supplies tend to lose capacity at approx 10% PER YEAR,

as already stated electrical sparking type sounds before a part fails usually means REPLACE all that are related to part that failed,

and one last bit of advice is put as much ram SPEED as you can afford (this has two benefits 1 higher performance, 2 net higher reliability in long term).

harpo

The 'trash can' is a container for a complete secondary computer suitable as a hand-me-down rather than consigning the not-used bits to a REAL 'trash can' aka land-fill.

You know fans DO die from dust-in-bearing failure - something pressurized air would never help?

Re 'price point' - high-end or highest-end components pull a false-premium price compared with components that are otherwise 'second-best' on the list.  The result is more bang for your buck....and those 'premium-priced' bits are the first to devalue once nwere more premium bits come out....

I still have my old P2 computer,,, or was it a P4, cannot remember? (400mghtz Pentium processor) one of those ones with the rectangular heat sink. I could never bring myself to throw it out because it was easily the best system i have ever had, so stable, absurdly stable, and so willing to handle any task/ game far bigger than it should. I have two other computers in storage in between that P2 and my current system.

Edit.... actually now that i think of it, it was probably Windows98 that i had to thank for the outstanding performance of that old pc!!

Fans never die on me, but they do often get tossed in the bin, shortly after developing an annoying sound (that cleaning/oiling wont cure)!

 

Fully agree, and this has always been my strategy!

Edit: i should mention that i bought that AMD system because Intel pissed me off changing their socket design too frequently.

The reason I meantioned that is it's the most recent failure on my machine.  It wasn't some 'generic' part...it was the fan in the Coolermaster V8 CPU cooler.  It 'died' to such an extent the fan seized to the point it was almost impossible to even rotate it by pushing by hand.

I had a chat to Yrag who suggested a brand replacement [of the fan] ... a Noctua NF-F12 PWM 120mm fan - which bolted in place nicely and runs better AND cooler.

I should point out the original had survived for 3.5 years of constant 24/7/365 running...

Might want to look into the new AMD processors. 8 core. 4.4 GHz. Cheaper than Intel. Good stuff.

Yea this is more along the lines of what i was thinking. Only obstacle is buying windows 7, because it is usually the case that the operating systems are vastly cheaper with a system. Which in itself is odd? because the margins on computer hardware are very tight, logically there should be no wiggle room to accommodate these cheap operating systems, it has to be some kind of scam agreement between Microsoft and hardware manufacturers??

Wish i could just buy the motherboard with operating system? Oh but i will still need at least one IDE port for my old cd rom drive, why?

answer... for some unknown reason, that old cd rom drive reads iffy disks really well,,,, disks that all the newer cd rom drives are all too 'precious' to read.

I have seen one or two recent amd mobos that have ONE ide port, but the last chipset in the intels that frequently had an ide was h61, (not easily found now and does NOT support overclocking)

harpo