The first thing to go might be the hard drive. Finally after about two years, I was able to take my Aspire 7741z out of its box and replace the hard drive with this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ.....82E16822178240 , but mine was $80. Apparently, they started bumping the price up by $10 a week for the past month. I ordered it and a 4GB RAM stick for a total of ~$108 with standard shipping and it finally got here. I was able to use my factory backup disks (THIS IS WHY YOU MAKE THEM TO BEGIN WITH!) to put windows 7 back on it. Now instead of 3GB of memory, it has 6GB, plus a 500GB hybrid drive instead of the crap 250GB WD hard drive. Everything's running nice and fast too :D I'm liking the hybrid part of the drive, but it does get warm compared to my dad's HP on the palm rest. Something about designs I guess. Plus, I went from a 5400 rpm platter speed to 7200 rpm speed. I guess that's the tradeoff for the faster speed. More heat, but at least it's working. :D