So I chickened out on the $.5K new pc ask, and decided to give my aging creaky old system another kick at the can with a new psu and hdd.
Been having intermittent problems with the drive for literally months, and the latest dvd fail (whatever the underlying cause) seems to have pushed it over the edge into a somewhat precipitous decline.
It was still bootable into linux last night, but slow and apt to lock up -- symptoms that have occurred often enough to suspect the issue is mb / psu related. xp hasn't been usable since the last optical drive fail, and for that matter its partition hasn't passed a chkdsk in recovery console even though all other ntfs volumes came up clean. The disk ominously fails all SMART tests** run from linux (smart data shows the drive as ok). FWIW, it's not made any clicking sounds so far.
If it turns out there's been mb damage then I can at least make use of the new components. I'm going up a grade from the usual dirt-cheap, minimally adequate psu to
this, which could actually work with a more power-sucking gpu should it come to that and, who knows, may even 'fix' some of the issues with current system.
**Edit: And it just passed a SMART test. Go figger. (still gonna replace it, bought the new drive already)
EDITED: 17 Jul 2015 22:56 by DSMITHHFX