There's occasional positive points to being the local 'guy that knows computars'.
A friend's mum had me build a PC for them 4 years ago. Mid spec to last a few years. The motherboard finally conked a few weeks back and this time round I pointed her to some good shops for a low-end off the shelf model.
She still wanted me to come round to set it all up and install all her programs back on (painless... HP don't ship too bad a build nowadays I see), and since she didn't have any use for the old PC components, I got to haul them in leiu of payment.
Since I can break the stuff down I managed to:
Double the RAM in my dads old PC
Upgrade his graphics card to 2 generations beyond
Upgrade him to a combi drive
Double his HD capacity
Update myself to a multi-monitor system and finally got a quality gaming CRT
Good quality spare case and PSU for another build
Everybody wins \o/
