Ok,i can understand that fear of flushing more money down the drain especially since you already spent 36 pounds on that HP supportdesk,but isn't there any possiblity that you can use one from someone you know to test it first ?

My Pavillion works fine, no crashes, nothing.

What model are you running? Mines a 790, which is literally only 3 months old...

kyleb - Not if you wanted 5.1 sound its not!  

Zeke - I wish I did know someone who could lend me a decent one! No-one I know round here would be willing to give me one at the moment... there is an important animation project due in a few days...  

Boonierat - yet another HP innovation was revealed to me today when I asked about changing the motherboard altogether....
"Oh, if we did replace your motherboard with another motherboard entirely, you would have to get one from us... we put our entire operating system within a small 8 gig partition on your hard drive... without it, you'll have to spend £250 on the Windows XP installation disk... ($350 US, $450 canadian)"
#### YOU, HP.
Why does it censor ####, and not flicking?

Alot of companys put the OS on the hardrive nowadays. it should'nt affect your changing out a mobo though. just put your old h/d on the new mobo and replace the drivers for the mobo/chipset/ect. most of them'll be on XP anyways, the new mobo will have a CD with it all on as well.

dont get an X~box dude. thats throwing good money after bad!  the amount they charge for games is beyond it!!. you can upgrade your mobo (birthday pressie) for under£80 (an Abit KX7 is only just over 80 and its a KT333, with NO onboard bullshit whatsoever!! a new PSU (300watt) will cost £30. if you look in the right place you'll get better.

if i was you i'd do a clean reinstall of windows on your PC, and turn all that bullshit in the background off too  ...

PS. where abouts in the UK are you?. if you're in Dorset i could help...

Thanks anyway, but I'm on the opposite side of the country! (The North West - Chorley)
I've actually turned off all the stuff running in the background, other than the important things, anyway!
I've just talked to HP again   and they're sending a technician to my house with a replacement mobo... if its the same mobo as the one I already have, I'll shove the #### thing down his throat! (The mobo, I mean)

i can kind of relate. We all get stuck with a POS our first time around and then we get burned and learn our lesson. My POS was a Compaq. Here's a tip, compaq sucks nuts (they got merged with HP lol). I had a lot of problems with that and i did everything i could to make it faster. I upgrading the 64MB pc100 sdram to 256mb pc100 sdram, and i threw in a GF2 MX400 PCI. That's right - you didn't read that wrong that was slow @ss pc100 and PCI graphics card (had no agp slot) It helped a lot but from my experience, with OEMs (hp, compaq, etc) you shouldn't invest more money in them, it's a lost cause. It would be better to just save up and build a custom one yourself. That's what i did and this rig is great. The best part is that when you're researching the stuff, you'll learn more about pc's than you'd imagine which helps a lot later.  Good luck with getting your stuff fixed. Another gaming pc site is alienware.com (I'm guessing that's the site because their name is alienware)

*Bump*