My old thing is gone. Ripped the C drive and CDROM Drive out of it earlier this evening. It has lost it. I personally think el procesador está frito.

80GB SATA (for the OS)
280 GB PATA (for all my stuff, taken from the old box)
AMD Athlon II (2.9something ghz)
GIGABYTE brand board, 2 PCI Express x16 slots
4 GB of RAM
ATI Radeon 5700 Series
Fresh, fancy new case, huge old flatscreen monitor.

Total cost: $450-$500 US Dollars.

Tell me what you think!

I'll build it when I get the money

Several months ago, I got my computer for $400 with these specifications:

6GB of DDR2 RAM
750 GB HDD
Duel core Althon II (Althlon II X2) at 2.7 GHZ
integrated graphics and sound
DVD/CD burner
I've got no clue what motherboard is in my rig, but it has one PCI express x16 slot, two PCI express X1 slots, and a standard PCI slot.

It might be less expensive to go for the already built rigs. Getting a fresh copy of Windows is almost as expensive as many computers today. (Maybe even more expensive) How do manufactures do it? OEM copies of the operating system are usually much much cheaper than the non OEM copies (and yes, this is legal), but they do have interesting side effects that come with them, such as there being no help content or support (most computer manufactures write their own help content and provide their own support, but if you get an out of the box OEM copy of Windows, you probably wont have help content, and Microsoft support will likely be very limited. )

You get the benefit of help content with the OEM copies of Windows on pre-built rigs.

I hope that this helps.

Until then I am stuck with this lappy with a small monitor, and the battery is shot, so it has to stay plugged in all the time.

The HDD has 26 GB (not that much)

26GB? Wow... That's tiny.

Yeah. I want my old HD Back. Is there such thing as a drive that can be connected via USB? Then again I may just put a floppy disk in for xtra storage.

Who does still need floppys?

Well, floppy drives will be obsolete soon, since for the most part you can do the exact same thing with a CD.

Strangely this laptop has a floppy drive.

Your laptop has a floppy drive?
I don't even have access to a computer with a floppy drive anymore.

I gues you can use a floppy drie to do the same thing a cd drive does, or vice versa.

But you get very slow speeds and 1.4 MB to work with.

Lately I've just been using a USB thumb drive.

Is it possible to hook up a drive via usb and not have to stick it inside a computer?

What do you mean?

The only thing I can think of it network attached storage (via your router), but I have no clue how to set that up.

A hard drive, that connects to your computer through USB, and the other end of the cable connects to the hard drive. The hard drive then sits on a shelf or something next to yoru computer or something. (I doubt this is possible )

[EDIT]Then of course you would have to have a power source...

There are two ways to do that:

1: buy an external hard drive.
2: get some sort of hard drive case that provides power to an internal hard drive and allows you to hook it up to a computer.

My family has more than enough external hard drives (I haven't bothered to count), but I've never used an external case for an internal drive like that.

I'm about ready to put a storage floppy in my floppy drive here. I'm chomping into almost half of my space and I got this only a month ago. Usually it takes me a year to eat up that much space.

But could you make use of 1.4 MB? Wow...

If I were you, I would just grab an external hard drive or something.

I might, but my USB is taken up, I may have to get a USB addon, give me some additional ports.

Did I also say on my old computer one of my Plug N Play ports was bent, and a cable couldn't be plugged into it? Old computers blow.