Ok for those of you who know anything about PCs hopefully this will mean something to you...

My PC is fixed and will be picked up tomorrow or Monday. The noise was from the fan on the graphics card which also cooled the CPU???? apparently you can't easily get a replacement fan so he has replaceds my graphics gard with a much better one, he then tried to boot it up and it took ages so he went into smart (to see staus of hard disc) and discovered the hard drive was failing.

My hard drive was 40 Gb so he got and 80Gb drive and cloned my original disc and still it took ages to boot up, he says it copied all the bad sectors aswell as the info and programmes so he got another 80 Gb drive and put XP pro and office on it. He has also copied across all of my documents. He then put in a new processor and a something DVI, which will apparently speed up pc and make connecting the flat screen better with the something dvi???

He says he cant copy across installed programmes such as photoshop and I will need to install them with the discs (ah...there in lies an eensy weensy problen!!!) but I have a bigger better faster pc. He also says when I have looked at the 1st 80Gb drive and found what I need to reinstall, I should reformat it and use it purely as a storage device so I always have a good back up of photos and files etc.

As he was telling me all this I becgan to see £ signs and got quite worried but think I got a brilliant deal £30 all in leads, monitor 2 new hard drives XP pro office, graphiocs card, processor and his time. Is that a fair price? Will be glad to have my PC back will just have to do without some of the stuff that was installed but hey it will work!!

Well Lynne I know 'nowt about 'puters but that seems a fair price given that most IT contractors used to charge that per hour four years ago........and more in many cases.

Lynne that was a really good price because I can't even buy those parts for £30.00.

That's a good deal Lynne you did very well.

DVI is the new industry standard for video graphics, it's replacing SVGA, it's short for Digital Video Interface, you'll notice the plug is bigger than the standard 15 pin SVGA one.

Thanks guys. Originally h wanted £40 for just the monitor, but he "can't find" the monitior he was going to sell me so instead i get a 17" TFT thrown in to the price. Have kept his email address incase I need him again. I assume he gets a great deal on prices as he works for a university as a technical guy so everything he gets (except 2nd hand stuff like the monitor) has maufacture guarantees etc. And I assume the monitor must be OK as he knows I will just bug him if its not!!

Havn't picked it up yet so will get it on Monday.