I'm going to be putting together an htpc, and I've got a case, ram, and hard drive, so I just need a cpu and motherboard. I don't need anything fancy, so I'd like to spend as little as necessary. I haven't seen many combo deals recently, should I just wait around a bit until one comes up? is it worth a trip to fry's, or should I wait for a sale?

AMD 1700+ does the job for me, and you'll want 512Mb ram
AMD Sempron 2400+ Boxed Processor with Motherboard $ 64.99
or

AMD Sempron 2500+ Boxed Processor with Motherboard - $ 74.99 would do the job.
You just gotta call outpost to ask if they are gonna get those back in stock anytime soon,
the last time I ordered from them when it said Call for Availability it took less than 2 weeks.

thanks for the links, I'll check them out

I'll bump this thread rather than create a new one.

My friend's PC died a few weeks ago and wants me to replace the dead motherboard/CPU. It currently contains an ECS K7VTA3 motherboard with possibly an Athlon XP 2500+ Socket 462 CPU. Any ideas on replacing this without having to get new memory and the likes? It had 1 stick of DDR 512 MB PC-2700 ram in it. He would like to spend as little as possible to get this up and running for his daughter. I suppose performance is minimal at this point.

He bought a nice PC at Circuit City last month that I found on B$ and he couldn't believe how cheap it rang up.

Any ideas?