I remember with an old one I was told it was too old to handle a new cpu. You say motherboards these days will be able to handle a quad core come its time, ok then. You are clearly the expert. To paraphrase Blackadder
"That I cannot say, Sir. I am one of those people who are quite happy to use computers but have absolutely no idea how they work"
well maybe a bit.
He wasn't advocating the total removal of fans, not that I think that's what you mean, but he said back when there was only one core it might only be 200Mhz (his words) and they buried it under a lump of cooling so they could overclock it to Ghz speeds. Didn't add up when he said it but I don't know how overclocking works unless you immerse it in liquid Nitrogen.
The DvD stuff was I think HD-Dvd and blue ray combined. Of course the massive cost might have also included the monitor and other stuff. I wasn't paying much attention to that one. But it surprised me when I saw another quad core system for nearly half price. Of course that didn't include monitor and looked a bit generic.
It wasn't that I doubted before, I believe what you say, only that I was keeping in mind it's usfulness in future but what you say about replacing the cores seems to make sense.
Furthermore, do you think 2GB of Ram is sufficent for now or should I continue to consider the future and go with 3GB?. Ram is very cheap these days.
Edit: My current system has three fans that I can see. One intake vent at the front and 2 (power supply + 1) in the back. I don't mind saying for years I didn't even realise the raised edges along the front were an intake. I commonly don't make the leap that normal people might.