I’ve just ordered a new motherboard (with USB3), 9500GT graphics card and 2x4Gb RAM as they’re the most obvious choices for whatever is wrong with my PC, add to that the new 620W PSU I’ve already bought.

If that doesn’t fix it, then I’ll have to order a new CPU and maybe SSD, but I can’t really see them being the culprits, and they’re the expensive bits.

I was thinking of a whole new PC, but that would be over £500 and wouldn’t be much better than my current one (albeit hopefully stable!)

I tried replacing the Nvidia proprietary drivers with the opensource Nouveau drivers, but I just had a crash, and they are hideously slow.

I’m also RMA’ing my WD Caviar Black hard disk, might as well get it replaced for the cost of shipping it back (under a fiver).

In the meantime I’ll be able to use my Core2Quad machine instead.