Are we supposed to guess what hardware you have? What model Compaq do you own?

 

pretty much, 250GB Serial ATA hard drive (7200 rpm), Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with 64MB dedicated video memory and up to 251MB total available memory as allocated by Windows Vista.

im just starting to getting into "building" my own pc so i apologize haha. eventually going to replace it all.

 

Okay, well, without a model number this is just going to be a bunch of assumptions but hey, you seem to be cool with that ("pretty much"). You haven't given a budget either.

Assuming your case can house an ATX motherboard (something you're going to want to be sure of before making any purchases):

GA-P35-DS3L $89.99
Q6600 $244.99

You might need to upgrade your PSU and it's probably worthwhile to upgrade your RAM:

ELT400AWT $54.99 (After MIR)
CORSAIR Dominator 2 x 1024MB DDR2 1066MHz $54.00 (After MIR)

Total (before shipping and after rebates): $443.97

 

Thank you very much. The model number is E2160 I believe. I'm a big WoWhead so going from a Dell XPS laptop to something with a celeron and 1gig isn't exactly my idea of awesome.