My mom's computer broke. Might be broken memory or overheating motherboard or something. Whatever it is, I don't have the time or resources to isolate the cause myself. It's definitely not a software problem because I get blue screens during the WinXP install from a known good disc.

Anyway, so I bought her a new computer. I gave her an estimate of $800, but it actually only cost her $343.49 plus tax/shipping which comes to $414.63. Here's the specs for someone who might want to similarly build a cheap computer.

I cheated a bit and I'm gonna re-use her old harddrive and DVD burner, 'cause I'm pretty sure those are not broken. The motherboard in particular looks really nice in that I wouldn't mind having it in my main system (if I didn't already have my Chaintech Zenith that is)

I think the most CPU intensive apps she use are MPEG-4 decoders (i.e. watching movies) and file sharing apps (they do a lot of "hashing" to detect whether two files with different filenames are equivalent), so I'd imagine the Celeron is "good enough". I gave her a whole gig of memory though because I want to eliminate the Windows XP swap file. Said file sharing apps are constantly reading and writing to the harddrive, so having a swap file would just slow things down even more.

Everything else she needs (soundcard, network, etc.) is built onto the motherboard. No video card because my mom stubbornly refuses to play computer games of any types (not even The Sims, Syberia or any other "female newbie" game).