having recently got a second hand system (elsewhere) that now seems to be playing up, i'm looking at the option of just getting a new motherboard, cpu/fan and ram as i'm not sure exactly what the problem is out of those components, but putting the ram in another pc the windows ram checker thing says there is a problem with the hardware, and putting ram from that same other pc (that does checkout fine when doing the windows ram checker thing) comes up with a similar error, so it sounds like the ram is faulty, and likewise the mobo and/or cpu if an error still appears with ram that checks fine from another system. i've went through the bios settings to try and get it to work but at least the ram is wonky it seems, and right now the pc won't boot. it did let me clone the drive with a self booting adonis cdrom though, so i'm going to try and reinstall windows on a spare drive just in case it's a very bad driver issue, but i was having problems over the past few weeks with the system crashing and rebooting etc
i can at least salvage the case, PSU, optical and HDD's
anyways, i'm not into gaming, i don't need any high powered stuff. anything dual core over 2ghz should be fine. so it doesn't matter if it's AMD or intel or whatever. i just want cheap bang for the buck, sub £100 if possible. what i would like are as many SATA ports as possible, at least 4, six would be great but i can use a pci-e card, and onboard graphics would be a bonus so i can use a pci-e16x graphics card to give me dual monitor so i can browse the web whilst watching tvcatchup or iplayer on the plasma. also an IDE/PATA socket would let me use an old dvdrw and IDE drive, but if that's going to add a lot to cost then i'd be best spending the money on a new drive or add on card. at least one PCI and at least 2 PCI-e x1 slots as well as the PCI-e x16 would also be great. i'm probably looking for 4gb RAM. a mobo with 4 ram slots rather than 2 is preferred, for future upgrading, but at the price point i'm probably pushing things unless there are older mobos going cheap
any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks