[Darkon47]

Well as you may have seen from the title, I have got a serious case of the gremlins, and I have seen the collapse of two high-end laptops within 2 years, and don't get me wrong, i did use the repair centers, they just came back worse, these were a Asus gaming laptop, and a HP media laptop in case you were wondering. My desktop is also in serious need of an update, and a few of my audio jacks have failed, and several of the USB ports are acting up.

My price range is 1250 or below, but i would like to keep the costs as low as possible, Either an upgrade to the Desktop to get it able to play new games at 30/60 fps whichever the cap is at (RPG's, i don't play shooters or Graphics intensive games) or a laptop that is actually durable.

My desktop currently has, 2.2GHZ AMD Athalon 64 bit dual core, 1 GB of DDR2 RAM, and an nVidia 7800 GTX, with 256meg of vRAM, the motherboard is old, but still has 1 more DDR2 slot, 2 DDR1 slots (i think thats what they are), and a secondary video card slot, i doubt i have enough power atm for much more, but i could get my hands on it really cheap.

If its a laptop, im most likely going to want to install some form of Unix on it, likely Gentoo or Ubuntu, and have a second boot into windows 7 or xp, but it needs to be durable.

Any advice? and please do forgive my tendency to rant, and do not forget about the Gremlins! I think the extra 20BP probably was not worth it.

[King Drahcir]

wipe the computers clean and start fresh. After you install the OS and all the drivers, if your hardware continues to act up, then its definitely a hardware issue. But until then, don't think it's not a conflict with scripts between programs. You'd be surprised what a simple wipe can do. And no, I dont mean throw in your OS disk and immediately start a reinstall, i mean WIPE IT CLEAN before doing anything else.

[Darkon47]

At this point the HP dosen't even boot any more, and the asus has a failed fan and a faulty motherboard. I have tried installing Windows XP, and 7 on them in addition to Mac OS 10.5, and Ubuntu, after a reformat of the entire HD each time. Simply put these laptops are dead and without opening them up and replacing the hardware they will not be fixed, I have tried opening up the Asus, but all i can really do is improve the air flow, nothing i can do about the motherboard.

I have tried everything me (CS undergrad), my brother(CS Masters Program), and my father(hes where we got it from...) could think of short of getting new hard ware, but we are mostly software focused recently which is why i am asking for advice on what new hardware to buy.

[ChaosMaster]

Simple question. You an Overclocker or not? PM when when you answer. I'll post a system build then.

[Darkon47]

I dont overclock because i usally dont need to, and with my case of the Gremlins, Overclocking is just asking for a disaster, took a look at what the desktop's motherboard is and its an Asus [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], and i would really rather not replace it. Thanks in advance for the help.

[ChaosMaster]

Originally Posted by Darkon47

I dont overclock because i usally dont need to, and with my case of the Gremlins, Overclocking is just asking for a disaster, took a look at what the desktop's motherboard is and its an Asus [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], and i would really rather not replace it. Thanks in advance for the help.

I'm not sure how old your laptops were. But here are some stats; basically SquareTrade (the biggest 3rd party warranty supplier in the US [the biggest laptop market in the world]) released a report on the failure rates of laptops in 3years. Asus 15.6%, Toshiba 15.7%, Sony 16.8%, Apple 17.4%, Dell 18.3%, Lenovo 21.5%, Acer 23.3%, Gateway 23.5% and HP 25.6%. So if you are considering another laptop, give Asus another shot. Although, if it's been less than 2 years, Asus would most likely replace your current laptop as their warranty is usually 2 years global.

As for your PC, I understand you wanting to keep as much as your old parts as possible. But I would advise you otherwise. AMD no longer sells CPU's that fit that socket. More over, 1GB of RAM is nothing, your board supports DDR1 RAM only, of which, since is so old, cost much more than DDR3. 1GB of DDR1 cost the same as 4GB of DDR3. Even if you add another graphics card to SLI, your CPU will be the bottleneck, and your PCI-E lanes are ver 1.0, and thus won't be able to make the most out of modern cards which are designed to run PCI-E2.0. Even if you upgrade your VGA, CPU, MB and RAM, you'll find your HDD will slow down the system. If you upgrade, I suggest you do a full system upgrade.

i5-2400 CPU
Asus P8H67-M MotherBoard
4GB 1333MHz DDR3 Kingston Value RAM
Gigabyte AMD 6850 VGA
1TB Samsung F3 HDD
60GB Vertex 2 SSD (optional for OS)
Lite-On DVD Writer (brand doesn't matter here)
Corsair TX-650 PSU

You can keep your keyboard, mouse, monitor and speakers. You most likely need the new PSU, as I don't think your current one has 20+4Pin for CPU power. All up, it works out to be about 1k AUD but stuff is a lot cheaper in USA. You'll save $150 not getting the SSD, but I highly suggest it, as HDD, even modern ones, are the bottle necks of most new systems.

[Darkon47]

I managed to get the HP to boot again, combination of 3 different stupid power supply issues, so i am no longer looking at new parts for a while, probably gonna upgrade the desktop once i get my paychecks for this semester and next however, so thank you for the input.

On a side note for those with HP laptops, make sure that if there is a little button on your battery, you don't accidentally press it, it seems to stop accepting charge if you do, it starts right back up once you press it again. (my charger and socket were also broken which is why i couldn't figure this out until i was about to scrap it for parts today ><).