Ill be honest, I stopped reading the other replys after seeing Lickety's first reply.. I found myself like that golden Retriever with his head stuck out the old Ford Truck following the strips in the middle of the road *Head Spins*...
Im going to throw my two cents in while im at it
If your looking for a music/surfing/general purposes computer and your looking to save some cash then I would suggest getting ahold of an MSI K7N2-Delta2
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813130475
Provided that you can find one at a local shop. My area is much like yours, im stuck with whatever the local shops have to offer OR pay out the arse for shipping. Im currently gaming on that motherboard, its as stabile as they come, and ive even overclocked without any issues. All around one hell of a board. Its based on the popular nForce 2 Ultra chipset (Popular awhile back) Im using a 2600+ Barton, you can get ahold of that or faster ones for much under 100 bucks. you can score some budget ram for about 50 bucks as well. I wouldnt suggest getting the semprons, they seemed like a great thing when released but generally you can get a slower clocked CPU of regular XP Athlon and compare it to the faster clocked with less L2 Cached Semprons and the XP Athlon will win it out, for around the same price. So you might as well have the extra L2 cache at your finger-tips.
If you want to use on-board video then look at the same board but non ultra and its called the IGP version of the chipset. Has a Geforce 2 MX400 onboard I believe. I didnt get that one as it was a non ultra and I was getting an AGP card anyhow. These boards have onboard 5.1 sound, which I use and dont complain. I was told that my Creative SB 5.1 Live is a bit better, but I didnt notice a bit of diffrence. Hard drives... Im using a Maxtor but in all honesty I dont have any preffrence over any company anymore.. WDC, Maxtor, Seagate all good companys even though ive heard about alot of seagates failing. I have a 160gig Barracuda, no problems so *Shrugs*
Id go with the person who said recycle your old optical drives and such. But if you feel the need for faster ones, and newer ones you can pick them up for realativly cheap. 2 years ago I got a LG (Made on Lite-On) that can burn CDs at 48x, and Read DVDs. Works great, no errors in any of my burns.
I still have a floppy irraguardless of all of the flack my friends give me about it lol. But one day I might just need it for some off the wall reason and its good to know its there. My next rig wont include one though