Okay, I have another way to go too. This was built for my wife a few years ago and with your help maybe I can upgrade it enough to run win7 with no problems. I don't know what the boards and stuff is but it is an AMD Dual System. It has only 2gig memory, a MSI Mainboard K8N6GM, only an 80gig HDD and a 1gig video card. What should I replace all this stuff with that won't cost me a fortune? As I said I am on a fixed income.
If you want to speed your PC up a lot. Get a SSD. They are basically the same as a HD as far as installing and will speed up your machine a tremendous amount. You can get a 120 GB for about $60 on special deals. Search Newegg or TigerDirect and you can find some good deals.
The first thing I'd do is try to confirm you have an ordinary ATX case of some type. It's possible you have some kind of non-standard cuckoo case that must be replaced due to incompatibilities with a standard power supply.
If you don't need a new case, you could replace other parts for roughly these prices:
Motherboard: 80 to 100
CPU: 65 on up (Intel Pentium G3240 or above)
RAM: 4 GB of DDR3: 40
Power supply, 300 to 400 watts, decent brand: 50
No video card; use graphics integrated on CPU
Hard drive, 500 GB to 1 TB: 50
Operating system, Win 7 or Win 8: 100
That's 385 minimum, excluding tax and shipping. A new cheaper case would be roughly 50 if you needed one.
Call it 400. It's very tough to beat Dell/HP/Lenovo at these low price levels because of the operating system price. The only advantage to you would be that you can choose exactly the parts you want and would have a clean Windows installation.
I don't know if you can afford 400. If you can't, you're likely better off with a pre-built system.
The farther above 400 you can spend, the more advantageous it is to you to build it yourself, assuming you have the time, talent, and inclination.
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