Yay! New computer.......sort of

[Hamster65]

About 3 weeks ago, the motherboard on my 15 year old Pentium 4 PC, finally bit the dust.
After going a whole week with no access to the internet other than my phone and tablet, I decided enough was enough so I borrowed an old Dell Inspiron zino from my brother. Not as old as mine but significantly slower......having only a 1.6 Ghz processor as opposed to the 3.2 Ghz mine had.

So now I had access to my forums again but, the lag was terrible.
Got online and started searching for options within my budget.
Found a refurbished HP 3130 Pro on Newegg.com for $159. Not a bad deal all things considered. It contained an I3 dual core, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB HD, DVDRW and integrated sound & graphics with 6 USB ports. So........I ordered it.
Got a call from one of their techs that same afternoon, informing me that the case on that one was all scratched up so, they upgraded me to an HP 6200 with a 2nd Gen I3 at no extra charge. All the other internals are the same except, this one has a total of 10 USB ports (6 rear and 4 front) and a slightly better integrated video card.
I knew going in that I wouldn't be able to transfer my video and sound cards over because they are both PCI and all these newer motherboards have PCIe slots. The onboard sound is great so, no worries there but, I need a better video card to play certain games I have.
I pulled the cover off to see what slots it has. I found 2 PCIe x1's, 1 PCIe x16 and what appears to be 1 standard PCI slot. If that's the case, I can still use my old video card until I can afford a new (better) one.
I'll have to fetch my old computer from my brothers house tomorrow and compare the 2 slots and find a way to clone my old HD onto the Solid State drive I bought when I thought my HD was bad.

P.S. I ordered the PC Tuesday morning with free shipping and it arrived Friday evening.

 

[LVSteve]

I would upgrade to a new desktop but I refuse to be supervised by Microsoft. (Check the Window 10 EULA to see what I mean.

 

[StakeOut]

You don't have to use Windows 10 just because the PC had it preinstalled.Format the drive and install the OS you want.Partition the drive and install 2 or 3 different OS.

I have one SSD with Windows 7 Ultimate,another SSD with Windows 8.1 Pro and a 3rd SSD with latest build of the Windows 10 Insider's Preview all inside a 10+ year old home built PC.

I don't like the slowness of spinning mechanical hard disk drives so I swapped them all out a few years ago with San Disk Solid State Drives.

I wipe the SSDs and reinstall the Windows OS every few months.

I have more than enough of fast memory to handle any operation or run every installed program.

 

[Tom S.]

I got a new computer too, but I'm having a hard time uploading pictures from it:

 

[Hamster65]

You don't have to use Windows 10 just because the PC had it preinstalled.

That's not always possible. I've run across a few that had some sort of special code built into the motherboard itself, that wouldn't allow it to run anything below Windows 10.

As for the rest, my budget is a bit too limited for that.