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Originally Posted by farmerjumperdon
I just replaced my kids PC. It was about 7 years old and is used mostly to surf the web and play their game and learning CD's. For my money, replacement was the way to go. I got a brand new eMachines with all the standard goodies (except monitor) for $150 ($350 on sale at Comp USA minus $200 in rebates). At that price, if you don't fix your own, they are not worth the time and money to repair.
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That's one of the reasons I closed down my storefront. There's just no way to compete when the computer(or just about anything else) starts to reach commodity status.
The nail in the coffin happened when I had people walk into my store and literally just drop computers (Dells, HP's Sonys, etc.) that were less then a year old on the floor and tell me they had too many problems with them and were going to buy a new one. Not even an attmept to fix them. Most of the problems were inexpensive fixes. Great for me, because I'd just find the bad part and resell the system or just take the parts.
Plus, in Massachusetts, you have to pay a fee to dispose of your computer. The persons didn't want to pay to have their computers disposed of, so just drop it off at the local computer store (which happened to be me).
While I agree that computers are being forced into early obsolescence, it makes sense to buy a new one instead of trying to reserect an old one, and as the OP has mentioned, his/her computer is 8 years old. Any type of upgrade path would be extremely expensive, if you can find parts at all.
The computers that can be had for a couple hundred bucks with everything embedded(Video,audio,lan) into the motherboard will dwarf anything built that long ago.