Waking Up is Hard to Do

The computer my son uses, a Compaq a1357c-b that I picked up at Costco a few years ago, broke recently. It's not the power supply, it's not any of the peripherals, which means it's the motherboard or the CPU. (When you turn the power on, it goes into "full fan" mode and then what usually happens is the BIOS wakes up and sets up the cooling properly and the fans spin down some, but it never makes it to that first beep).

So it's broken.

I have another computer I'm trying to replace it with. Two problems: The PCIe video card I had in the broken system doesn't fit in the replacement, which has an AGP slot. And, on the replacement, Windows 7 refuses to go to sleep.

It thinks it's going to sleep, but it leaves the fans running, and doesn't wake up when you move the mouse or hit the keyboard. Not really sleep so much as a snoring coma that it won't come out of.

I updated the BIOS, I got all the newer drivers I could find, but the P5PE-VM motherboard in this system is just too old.

So I'm looking at rejuvenating it.

The cheapest i3 processor, Intel's current entry-level processor, is $139.97, and the cheapest motherboard is $83.97.

Meanwhile in the AMD camp you can get an Athlon X2 5000+ chip for $65.99 (this was a $696 chip when it came out) and motherboard for $65.99

$223 vs $132, and if I go with the AMD system, I can reuse the RAM I already have. I guess that's the way to go. But it feels like a move backwards.

As long as it wakes up.