I managed to cook something on my laptop which was about 3 years old and wasn’t worth any repairs so was fit for the bin. I have very little money at present due to house renovation so this is absolute budget.We had recently moved house and used my in-laws garage to store stuff during the move, when clearing out the garage I cam across my father-in-law old pc which years ago I promised to wipe the hard drive and forgot all about it. So decided to see if I could restore it to working order. The case is battered and had a puddle of water in it not a promising start. I decided to take it home as I needed a machine for general word and excel docs. The PSU looked very rusty so decided to bin it and buy a cheap 500w to replace it. Before booting the pc I dried off what I could and left the pc in my airing cupboard for 2 weeks. Momtof truth new PSU fitted powers up but no disk recognised with the disk making really bad noises, thankfully I have my 250gb ssd from my laptop with win 10 os. Stuck that in great we are getting bios and a window boot. Unfortunately windows failed to boot due to the licensing being locked to my laptop. Thankfully I had the original win7 disc for the pc, a format and install later I’m up and running all be it at a very slow speed due to the bottleknecking at the cpu I can live with it though.
After a bit of hunting around a week later I found for £20 a phenom II x4 b55 to replace the Athlon II x2 250 in my micro atx am2+ Foxconn MB. Fitted and slight OC boot time is 15sec happy days. W few weeks ago I purchased a GT610 1gb gpu not great but affordable and a considerable upgrade to the on board gpu which is shocking at least I can play a basic game on my pc such as sins of a solar empire.

My next stage

See what max ram MB can take and buy it if I can afford.
Save for a 800w ish modular PSU

* mother board Foxconn A47-MK am2+

Latest update.

I have a ryzen3 1200 ready to install

And picking up a motherboard asrock A320m pro4 today and it’s coming with 8gb 2400mhz ram (2x4gb).

Midnight tonight when I am home from work I will be rigging it up and hopefully have a modern pc.

Not expecting great performance with it but a good start towards a more reliable and better performance than I currently have