[Suicide Junkie]

Are you sure its the hardware?
It might just need some dusting. Pull stuff out, clean it, and reseat it nice and snug.

And if you're using windows, you probably need to format and reinstall it. A typical install of windows ages about as fast as fruit left sitting on the kitchen table. Go for a nice, relatively efficient 98(se) or 2k instead of the other bloated gunk they're pushing these days.

Make a disk image of your clean install for future use in restoring it to working condition, and partition off a section of drive for your personal files so they don't die when windows does.