Foot In The Door

I've been meaning to get an upgrade going this year but that had to take a backseat because of the construction work we had to do on our recently acquired house. By a fortunate twist of events a few of my friends are in need Socket A parts that I have in my machine. One officemate was convincing me to sell my motherboard to him, as his Asus motherboard just kicked the bucket. Another friend is asking for my processor and RAM so he can finally get his aging Duron system a boost.

I've been mulling over gutting my machine and doing what I call a foot-in-the-door upgrade. See with quadcore chips just barely out the door, the prices of 64-bit single core chips have gone down that the slowest Athlon 64 is now at a price point where its equal to the money I forked out for my Sempron 2400+ some 2 1/2 years ago. If I buy an AM2 board, my upgrade path is secure. I get the parts I need at a not-so-premium price and I can upgrade to dual-core several months after and quadcore further down the road.

If I sell my parts, I'll probably raise around 5,000 pesos. Now to get a Gigabyte Socket AM2 board with integrated graphics (I'm no gamer anyway), an Athlon 64 3000+ and a Gig of DDR2 memory I'd have to raise 13,000. I've already sold a Palm handheld I've been holding on to just to get a little bit more cash, but I don't think I can get more to get this upgrade going. I'm already looking at other options, like selling my phone cheap. I have around 20 comic books gathering dust in my closet that I don't know the value of. I was told some of them were rare ones. I've asked another officemate I'd give him any one of the titles if he sells the rest. Rumaging the closest yielded no other items that I could sell though. ~sigh

I'm still undecided at this point.