Finally gave in and bought myself a new rig last week to replace the semi-dead Core 2 Duo rig. After some thought, I went with the i5-750 rig with the USB 3 capable and somewhat over priced Gigabyte P55A-UD4P motherboard. So far, it's running at 3.6 Ghz stable at stock 1.18V and I think it's more than adequate for me as I don't really have that time for games anymore (sigh) and I don't do that much number crunching.
Unfortunately though, I have another hardware failure to contend with. This time it is the primary OS hard disk in my old AMD Athlon 64 file server rig.. Thankfully Ubuntu seems to be able to read off the hard disk and I should be able to rescue the bulk of my data from it. Ironically, I used Ubuntu to rescue the contents of the failed hard disk before as well! I'm still debating whether to buy a replacement hard disk for it or just trudge along with a recycled and the soon to be out of warranty 320 GB Seagate hard disk.
It certainly does look like the Year of the Tiger is giving a dragon plenty of hardware woes!