I need a Tech...

Who is the best at diagnosing a motherboard issue? I have a 2008 HP a6130n desktop computer my wife and I bought brand new. About 6 months after we bought it, it started giving BSOD errors, and the screen would jumble after a day or so of being on. Would reboot and all would be fine.

However, eventually it gave a hard disk failure, so I would reformat and things would go back to normal. Use it for a week or two, sometimes a month, then it would start having issues again. I thought it was the hard drive, so I contacted HP about warranty work, and they kept making me run the same hard disk check over and over again (which takes 6 hours) and it felt like they wanted me to give up on it. Finally they told me the hard drive was bad, but that I was out of warranty and they wanted $200 to replace it. BS.

So I went to Best Buy and bought a 500gb hard drive, installed it, and it worked fine for about a day, then started having the same issues. I thought maybe Vista was the issue so I loaded XP Professional and it worked fine for a bit, then started giving the same issues.

Looking up my symptoms online gave me a laundry list of things to try, so one by one I replaced the hard drive (again), the Fan, tried each memory stick one at a time, and it always seems to end up with the same issue.

After messing with it so long, now it won't even boot up past the Windows logo. You can go in to BIOS or boot from DOS, but whether in safe mode or regular, it won't go past the boot menu. I tried reformatting again, but it fails about halfway through.

With computers getting cheaper and cheaper, i kind of think it would be cheaper to buy a new one, but at the same time we already have 2 laptops in addition to this, and I don't want to just throw this one away.

The only things left that I can think of are the graphics card, video card, or the motherboard itself.

Any suggestions? It's completely dismantled, so I can bring the motherboard wherever needed if someone wants to look it over for a few days. I am in no hurry, but the laptops are MACs and I am starting a bunch of CAD classes soon and don't feel like installing XP on my MBP just to run Pro-E or SolidWorks. Having at least one PC in the house would be nice.

thanks for whatever you can offer...