Bad Weater = Crashed Computer

[Eric]

Okay, Sunday we had biblical flooding in my neighborhood. Small cars and farm animals were floating down the road in front of my house. Well, not really, but I did see a lady with a trash bag over her head running down the street.

 

Anyway, the storms seem to have crashed my hard drive. I can't get my system to actually boot into windows. The Bios window works fine, and the Windows loading screens seem to work fine, but when it gets to the point of popping up the windows login screen, I get the blue screen that says device not found or something to that effect. Safe Mode didn't work either.

 

The system already took about 3-4 minutes to load up windows, so I figured I might as well change out a few parts while I'm replacing the hard drive. Here is what I currently have

 

P4 HT 3.2GHz processor

512MB DDR 400 ram

Abit IC7 mb

CD/RW

AGP Graphics Card (good, but cheap)

Dead SATA 80gb HD

400W Allied ATX power supply

5-1 Media reader with USB port

Good case

 

I'm looking at swapping out the MB with an Asus P5AD2 Deluxe MB ($184.94), which will force me to upgrade my graphics card to PCI Express - thinking maybe the Asus Extreme AX700Pro PCI Express card ($180.50), and for the HD I am looking at the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus9 80GB Serial ATA-150 8mb 7200rpm drive ($63.75). I'm looking at roughly $430 shipped for these 3 items.

 

Can anyone tell me if this is a good purchase? Or should I look at other items. I'm trying not to spend too much money (it's just my home computer), but I don't want to get crap either. It will mostly be for Autocad and gaming.