I wrote this yesterday and failed to publish it. Try, try and try again...

It's all about the purchasing at the moment. I've been watching several motherboard cpu bundles on ebay. Most of them have ended up being sold for about fifty pound. Which is at the upper limit of what I want to spend. Yesterday I came across a lot for an Asus M2A-VM motherboard, Athlon 64 x2 4600 processor and a gigabyte of DDR2 ram for thirty pounds which seemed like a bargain. I looked into it a bit further and just buying the processor separately would have come out at about the same price with the motherboard and memory costing about another twenty. A not insignificant saving. On the negative side it is all a bit old and far from cutting edge. The motherboard made it's debut in two thousand and five. Also it doesn't ship with any manual which may cause problems. Overall though I've decided that it is worth a punt and bought five sets to add to the one I'm not using in my Acer Aspire.