My PC has been on it's last legs since I last had it in for service two years ago. It started acting up the year before after it stopped running due to what ended up being a bad power supply and one bad memory stick.  Ironically, after PC Guru fixed those problems, it started having spontaneous reboot issues, first having a few clusters of it then being good for weeks at a time, and as recently as last week crashing every few days.  It could never decide if the issue was hardware or software, to the point of being pissy with no less than three different anti-virus software packages, each replacing one I ripped out completely down to the registry (done properly, I'm not an idiot).

But it wasn't letting me do anything but boot up over the weekend, so I decided to update my December research on the cost of building a new system, as well as seeing about the cost of pre-built ones. I can get a better system than I can build for about half the cost, before the $24 shipping cost.  But it's also an expandable system, as as at least one of my hard drives is still good, it's worth the investment.

And  tonight, the CPU fan is not consistently running, and it's a cycle of booting and failure to boot. No point in kicking the proverbial dead horse. 

I'm fairly sure I can easily get data off the primary drive just fine, but I suspect it does have some corrupt software on it.  This is a system I originally built the day after knee surgery, on vicodin and a pain pump as well as nearly completely immobile.  It worked the very first time I booted it up, thank my newly minted (at the time) A+ certification that only came in handy to build that system.

Of course, every part has since been replaced in the last four years or so, but still, it's had a good run, and instead of spending more time and wasting more money trying to find the root cause, technology has moved on to the point I should just build a new one.

I could build a new one again, but why spend $750 or more for something I can get for $369 that's expandable? Of course, I'm forced to get the included peripherals, including mouse, keyboard, and speakers, but I can always use spares, and this way I can use the mouse and keyboard with my laptop instead of fighting with the too tiny keyboard and oversensitive scrollpad and cursor on that. 

It does come with Vista, but I still have my XP disc if it turns out to be problematic.

Of course, this isn't what I wanted to get myself for my birthday.