Joe's computer

I was asked to fix Joe's computer today as somehow his computer didn't boot up. From its beeps I realised it's caused by the video card or its cable. But apparently the problem is not that all. Some messages about SATA and RAID show up after booting up, and it also looks like some hardwares can hardly be detected. This is solely some mis-setting on BIOS. The biggest problem is that he wants to play online game (World of Warcraft) with this 3-year old machine, with which it's quite hard to play seamlessly. Actually even now the speed of the computer is quite bloody slow for daily use. What he can do is reinstall the whole Winblows Windows system for short term, or upgrade his hardwares for long term's viewpoint. The re-installation itself is not quite a hard task for me; the installation disk is the one Jou borrowed from his friend. As this is illegal version and the system can't be updated from M$'s website, the security issue is quite of concern to me. To play his game smoothly, it's unavailable for Jou to get some new parts and upgrade the spec of the computer (VGA, RAM, CPU, and hence motherboard as well). He said he'd buy new RAM module tomorrow morning. By the way. here is the current spec of Jou's computer (just in case): CPU: AMD Athlon 2100+ MB: Gigabyte 7VAXP Ultra RAM: 256 + 512 MB (I find the 512MB one is not working :P ) HD: Seagate 80G Audio: onboard NIC: onboard (RTL8139)