�250 = ~500$CAD (i'll just work with CAD for now)

cpu: intel i5 2500 (NON k)
- 190$
mboard: asus p8h61
- 90$
memory: anything, it's so cheap... ex: patriot 2x4gb pc3 10666
- 45$
video: not too sure... but any of the older nvidia gt/gts 200-400 cards are probably around 100$ - 130$?

this will come to about 455$.
Now you just need some HDD (SSD is nice but it's not strictly necessary)
50-100$ can probably get you 250-500gb

this is all brand new stuff. i'm sure others will have better suggestions, but you can get quite good stuff for your �250.

you can probably run even crysis 2 fairly well with that. not maxed out at 1600x1200 of course, but better than 800x600 with everything on low too. 

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/251001762151?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1438.l2649

what do you guys think?

a good starting point, and when the other previously mentioned higher spec stuff comes down in price, i will upgrade to that. i shouldn't be needing to do that for a year a two. 

I don't see why you would want to get a Core 2 Duo this badly. Quad core processors aren't expensive, either, and I consider them low- to mid-range standard these days, whereas dual core seems somewhat antiquated already. Also, I'd suggest a graphics card with more memory - there are many 9600GT models with 1024MB. 

9600 - �40 maybe
250SATA - �25 (atm)
That case - �20 lets call it
PSU - �30
DVD - �10
RAM - funny one to value - expensive to buy still but verging on obsolete - �20
Mobo - �20
----
�165

Then u get Vista, another drive, a floppy drive, wifi adapter.

I guess �179 aint too bad.

If you check out the motherboard and cooler, then if you buy some new DDR2 1066Mhz RAM, u can overclock probably. 

..and the bloke's coming round 2moro morning to deliver it personally! 

Why even bother with one? 

so he can install the drivers for his 28.8 modem 

Yeah that is pretty cheap, it'll do if your playing 3 year old games.

Nice lookin case, although those blue lights would irritate me. 

personally i'd feel like I got gypped out of the joyous computer building stage though. Plus, warranties! 

once in a while, after booting up, one of my harddrives is extremely slow. it takes ages just to get file info listed in explorer.
rebooting fixes this.
should i be looking at a new hdd? 

Indexing settings:

http://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-7/windows-7-file-search-indexing-options/ 

i have it turned off for that disk, so it's not indexing or anything.
also, i've experienced the type of slow down during indexing before and rhis is a _lot_ slower.
you can't even watch a video because it'll constantly stall waiting for frames. 

Is it defragged? How much free space is not the drive?

If the answer to those questions are 'yes' and 'plenty' respectively, then PANIC!! Get new drive, and back that shit up pronto!!!

Or at least that's my gut reaction. 

 

yeah, i'm starting to worry a bit. it's not really fragmented, but there's very little space left on it.
still, if these were the problems, then it would always be slow.
I do have a backup, but i wanted to be sure before i go out and get a new one. :) 

what do the SMART values say? monitor them for a while to see changes. 

thanks for reminding me about that. speedfan shows a few categories as being in the 'watch' level (as opposed to very good or normal......)
so i'm not sure how to really interpret these values.
not much on google about this either. i suppose it varies between manufacturers? 

A single look at SMART is useless, you would need to monitor the values. I use Munin. http://i.imgur.com/R2HTl.png 

This time on a different disk then my last post.
Been getting a lot of 'bad block' error events alongside long (10-20s) lockups during disk access.

I've backed up all important data on it and am currently running a chkdsk /r (will probably take all day to finish...)

I've read conflicting opinions about this, some say it's just a simple fix of running chkdsk and reallocating those blocks and others say a bad block error is the herald of impending doom and the HDD is bound to fail.

any opinions on the matter? 

 

bad sectors can be caused by the motherboard? i thought they were physical errors on the drives themselves.

the board is a p8h67-m (revision 3), the hdd is a WD15EARX or WD15EARS (locked in chkdsk so can't check atm) 

the windows 7 jumplist had stopped working and i see there was a bad cluster in that exact file... weird.

still going... man chkdsk on large hdds take forever. 

harddrives are disposable storage, better have backups. badblocks do not mean that complete failure is imminent. they are no definitive sign for anything really. I have some flash memory that had badblocks from the factory. runs without problems for 2 years now.

always assume your media will be unreadable tomorrow. 

yes, that's how I feel about hdds these days; I have two seperate backup hdds now.

so far chkdsk has replaced two separate instances of bad clusters on the drive.

badblocks do not mean that complete failure is imminent
the drive is a little over a year old, but does get heavy use. i shall definitely err on the side of caution for this and i'll be picking up a replacement tommorow. 

You will have to acquire a copy if you don't want to pay for it. It's saved me a couple of laptop hard drives.