Apparently it was the motherboard, not really a big deal since the value to me was in the components. My dvd burner was external, my hard drive with all of my music on it is external.

I pulled the hard drive out before trashing it.

Here is what I am looking for.

A desktop reasonably fast that I can simply throw my old hard drive in and be same as it ever was.
Where can I find a machine with no hard drive? Is this even possible?

Oh, and I don't want to spend much money.

look on tigerdirect or a similar site and see what they have for "bare bones" systems. Generally you'll get a case, a motherboard and a power supply for super cheap, but sometimes they have other components as well like a video card or a hard drive.



http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_tlc.asp?CatId=31