My PC adventures

I am pleased to report the the PC that I created from old parts and a £10 motherboard from eBay has been working perfectly (if not a little slowly) whilst my main PC has been at the menders...
I got a call from the computer shop to say that he had a spare mobo with CPU and RAM left over from a recent upgrade (ironic because the 'old' kit left over from the upgrade was actually better than my original one..). He fitted the new mobo and got it all running for a grand total of £50 which I am more than pleased with.
I have three new 512MB SDRAM chips coming from eBay to add the final touches to my spare PC and I am considering putting another GB of RAM onto my recently refurbished main machine. I was mightily relieved to find that we didn't need to reload the Operating system and all my programs and data are intact..but the lesson is learned and I was glad of the trial run at recovering my online 'life' after a major PC crash. One thing I discovered is that certain parts of my backup system had not been working properly, so that has been all put to rights now. I can certainly see the value of having a 'spare' PC and keeping it up to date in case the same type of thing happens again, and you don't need to spend much to acheive this. Another discovery is that actually computers are not as scary to fix as you might think, and OK we are not getting down to component-level here, but when you consider that parts that make up the whole, ths system is relatively simple to grasp.
Maybe I will start building that dual-core machine...the only thing that stops me is that it is so damn cheap to buy on off the shelf anyway at todays prices.