Regarding what to do with your HP and blown motherboard:

I just had a similar situation happen.  I bought a 'barebones' from 
www.pcclub.com.  I put my burner, hard drive and video card into it and have 
been all the better for speed and performance since.

Chances are, your power supply blew your motherboard, so don't keep that.

For cost's sake, I got a standard case (which comes with power supply), an 
Abit motherboard, 512 DDR Ram (that's another thing...you need to upgrade 
your RAM)and a retail AMD Sempron 3200 with fan. It was about 200 hundred 
dollars.  Windows XP installed to that motherboard from a SATA drive without 
asking for any drivers except my wireless network card!

I was up and running within an hour!

gary r. tennesen
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