I've had to return my Asus A8N32-SLI Motherboard to ebuyer and as they no longer stock that model i've had a full refund.

Obviously this an opportunity to upgrade my system - so does anyone have any recommendations for motherboards and processors i should look out for? I generally use my pc for home recording and gaming and I've got about 200 -250 quid to spare.

Also will i have any rebooting issues with xp when i reconnect my hard drives (i've got one with xp on it and another for the music) to the new motherboard?

Cheers.

try and buy the same chipset as your old board ie. Nvidia to Nvidia or Intel to Intel , this may let you reconnect without formatting.

as far as recommendations, that price can get you a nice quad core Intel,motherboard and 2gb of DDR2

I've had to return my Asus A8N32-SLI Motherboard to ebuyer and as they no longer stock that model i've had a full refund.

Obviously this an opportunity to upgrade my system - so does anyone have any recommendations for motherboards and processors i should look out for? I generally use my pc for home recording and gaming and I've got about 200 -250 quid to spare.

Also will i have any rebooting issues with xp when i reconnect my hard drives (i've got one with xp on it and another for the music) to the new motherboard?

Cheers.

You'll have a mass driver installation session when you first boot your PC up, but you shouldn't have any problems once all the drivers are installed.

I'd go for an intel processor, possibly quad core for gaming, and then 2GB of DDR2 RAM and a decent motherboard.

http://www.novatech.co.uk have some good motherboard bundles but I understand they're not as cheap as they used to be.

I've upgraded motherboards before with no, or just minor, issues, but recently did the same with my sons PC and XP simply refused to boot even in safe mode.
Ended up booting off the XP CD and going through the repair process, then re-install SP2, then all the updates post SP2.
Then it would boot, but it only stopped whinging after re-installing a bunch of hardware drivers. Still not convinced it's fully right, but it's usuable again.

It would have been a whole lot simpler to just format the (partitioned drive) drive and start over from scratch.

i would say buy a new hdd install windows on that and use the other as a back up if you can it easyer i think