Need advice for “Patch Work” system

[htpc_user]

I’ve been racking my brain trying to decide the best way to go with one of my systems, so I thought I’d see if anyone had any advice that maybe I’ve overlooked.  I have 4 PCs that I try to keep going…my HTPC, my main PC, my son’s PC, and my dad’s PC.  I have finally decided to throw in the towel on my dad’s PC and admit defeat.  It has never been a good board (a Chaintech socket A); any time that it is unplugged it comes up and says the CPU has been changed, hit F1 to continue or DEL to enter setup.  If you just go in to the BIOS and save, then everything’s fine until you do something else to it or power outage or whatever.  The date also reverts back to 2004 and causes a problem for him with pokerstars.net if he doesn’t fix it.  Not a big problem, but used to throw my dad for a loop when it wouldn’t boot up to Windows.  Recently I put a Radeon 9600 Pro in his PC to upgrade from a Geforce 2 MX400.  But after I did, the screen would “jump” and be jittery.  It was almost as if he nor my son noticed it, but it drove me nuts…and believe me it WAS noticeable.  I got so tired of seeing it I decided to give him my 6600GT since the Radeon was working OK in mine; the Radeon had been quirky in mine but OK as long as I used 5-7 drivers (I tried those on his too, but it didn’t fix the problem).  The 6600GT was a disaster, too.  It would lock up with that in it.  So I tried going back to the Radeon and things got worse.  It wouldn’t boot.  So I tried the old MX400 and it didn’t work either.  His monitor says “Monitor working.  Check PC or connection.”  I opened it up today and took the RAM out and then back in and got it to come up.  But it will lock up each time no matter what I do. 

So here’s the thing.  I want to upgrade my main PC but don’t have the money to jump in to it now.  But I don’t really want to buy another Socket A motherboard for him.  I’d like to give him MY socket A system (ASUS motherboard, Sempron 2800 cpu) and get something “cheap” for myself.  The problem is the stuff that I have to buy just go with a “cheap” upgrade.  I thought about an AM2 motherboard with something like a 4200 cpu.  But then I’ll also have to buy RAM and a PCI-e video card.  See how the price goes up?  And ALL of the motherboards I looked at on newegg only have 1 IDE port.  The cheapest way to go would probably be to do the same thing I did with my HTPC…buy the same AsRock motherboard that has AGP and PCI-e and both types of RAM slots.  That way I can get a Core 2 cpu and use the RAM that I have now and the same AGP video card.  Then upgrade it all later.  But I don’t really want to have 2 of these motherboards.  Anybody have any suggestions?

[Author]

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