Shutdown, fan, mobo and other such problems

[Red Mage Black]

So yeah, I'm going to state for the record that my computer is a Dell PowerEdge 400SC. It still has... well, most of the core stuff still on it. Info includes:
- 1GB RAM
- 512MB Video RAM
- 2.0 GHZ
- Running Ubuntu 11.10 (Because any higher and my computer would be unusable)


This thing is older than two of my nieces combined. See, I can plug in the CD drive, but if I plug it into the motherboard, my main HD won't boot the OS. On top of that, the fan on the power supply is making funny noises. It use to do this only rarely which was very annoying, but at least it stopped. I've tried cleaning what I could, but there isn't much to clean out. I've jammed it for the time being... which has been the last few months. As much as I leave it running, it doesn't seem to overheat, but it only feels like a matter of time before it simply burns out and dies.

Another problem I seem to have is image loading. Any picture that goes above 1500px(in either dimension) seems to lag badly. Hell, it even lags when I type for a while. Now, I didn't always have this problem. Not when I had windows at least. On that note, as I mentioned Ubuntu above, I've gone into System Monitor and double checked the processes. There's a lot of idle ones, but most of them outside of what I'm using tend to be vital. I haven't seen any memory leaks, so I'm not entirely sure why after I leave my computer idle for a while, it starts getting sluggish. Half the time, I need to restart my computer just to get it to normal again.

Worst part it, due to the CD drive not working, I can't really install anything else. For some reason, it won't recognize my USB storage. Though it did when I installed Ubuntu, back when I formatted the thing to do so. However, when I try to install Windows again, it tells me that the install.ini is missing from it.

This thing is seriously on the way out, but I don't have the money to get anything else.