New Computer Help.

[Moon Jump]

Hey folks, about three weeks ago when I was away at Otakon in Baltimore, my house got struck by lightning. The house itself is fine, but we're finding more stuff that got zapped by the strike.

One of the things that got zapped was my sound card, speakers and headphones, but somehow the computer still works and I have all my stuff on it.

After my dad spoke to the insurance company about it, he told them this computer I'm on now is over five years old and they said they would completely replace the computer as part of the policy.

I'm not sure how much they'd give us for the computer, it's really out of date and as I've said it's on rambus RAM, so I could never update it. The only thing I had going for it was I had it made with a DVD drive and a 112 Gig hard drive. I only upgraded the graphics card when I saw one was on sale, so I didn't really do anything to it.

I'm not sure how much money they'll give back to us to spend on a whole new computer, but I'm thinking if they give us anything near 500, I might be able to get something I could upgrade and have for a couple of years down the road.

I would like to get an easy to use computer, that I would be able to upgrade so it won't be completely worthless. I'd like to be able to run City again as well as Team Fortress 2, my current computer SAYS it should run it, but I tried it and it ran like crap.

If anybody could help me out, please let me know. Here's my current rig's stats with what I have.

Dell Dimension 8250
Pentium 4 CPU 2.40GHz
2.39 GHz, 512 of RAM

and I got an

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 when it was on sale, better then what I had when it came with it.

[Blackbat]

I recently built a new machine for myself. I reused my HDD's, DVD Drive, Graphics Card and Case.

Bought a new Motherboard, CPU (with fan), Memory and some additional case fans all for under $450. I bought it all off Newegg.com

[iggy880]

With $500 you could buy a pretty good pre-built machine, mainly if you look at stores and ads. My PC back home is about 5 years old now and was $500 and we could upgrade it up to an Nvidea 6200 and 1 GB RAM, both would be basic nowadays though. So you could get well over your machine, likely able to run those. I mean, I got my laptop which can do that smoothly for $700 by finding sales, you could get that in a desktop for $500 for sure.

But(to contradict myself) the best option would be to build one. You can get the components are cheap individually, you can get a pretty good case for around $100 or less if not picky on quality. A good motherboard can be $50-$100, go for Nvidea 7000 series to be cheaper(if you want the upgrade) 2 GB of RAM is a good start and easier to install then 3 and sound comes on the board. You could try to build it yourself, not to hard, or you would be surprised how many people can do it for you(I found out my friend could when I considered it) or you could of course pay some pros.

[Moon Jump]

Well, my dad just heard back from the insurance company. They said my computer's value went down 90% but they'd still cover it up to 899, much more then I thought I was going to get.

I'm going to ask my friends what the best options would be. I wanted to see about getting one of those portable hard drives like Yin got (But not 1TB) and see if could scrap the HDD,DVD drive and CD Burner and put it into a new rig that I WILL be able to upgrade.

I also have to see about this whole Vista bull*hit. My friend got a new computer and when he went to update his Vista, the whole thing crashed and lost everything. He's so lazy he didn't bother to get a portable disk drive and put the data on, he just went with it empty.