Bad RAM could have corrupted the file as it was being written to disk. The file is corrupted all along, but not the disk/filesystem's fault

Or the file could have been corrupted in RAM on read, and would actually be fine if read on a working machine.

Or the disk has been replaced in those 6 years and the file was corrupted during the copy because of bad RAM

There are lots of possibilities for the file to get corrupted that don't involve the disk or filesystem.

No, there really isn't an equivalent. Which is more important, CPU power or GPU power?

The closest AMD in price with a GPU is the A6-6400K. It would be quite a bit better in the GPU department, but MASSIVELY worse in the CPU department. Not even close in CPU power. To get something that wont cripple you on CPU you would need to go up to the A8-6600K, but that is over $110 at the CAD stores I checked and would still be way worse in single thread CPU.

There are also the new Kabini CPUs and the top end of those, the Athlon 5350, is around $70. It would save you money on the MB (AM1 boards are cheap), but would be even worse than the A6-6400K in CPU and might not even match the G3240 in GPU.

Neither VNC or RDP require that the server have any local video capabilities. It is quite possible to run a Windows server headless.

RDP can remote single applications and has been able to for years. No full desktop required.

Both the AMD E2 or Celeron 847 will smoke an Atom N450 in performance. Both are just fine for an average email/web surfing box assuming the rest of the system isn't complete crap. Both have way better graphics as well with the edge going to the E2, but the Celeron has much better CPU performance.

Clock speed doesn't mean everything. Remember when the P4 first came out and a P3 of 400-500 lower MHz could keep up with it? Sandy Bridge has very good IPC. I have a laptop with an i5-2467M and I have it configured to lock the speed at a mere 800 MHz when on battery and I don't even notice unless I try to do something CPU intensive. It does have an SSD an 8 GB of RAM though.

As 0123456 said, a Celeron 847 is about twice the speed of a 3.8GHz P4. The Celeron actually has MORE cache than the P4 in total (548K more to be exact). Plus it likely would have faster memory and a much faster interface to the rest of the system components.

You do realize that a Celeron 847 is way faster than the GP's P4 3.8 GHz? Don't let the Celeron name fool you, it is still a dual core sandy bridge chip, just clocked low.

The lowest end AMD E2s might get bested by the P4, but the higher clocked ones would still be a big improvement.

The bigger problem with most cheap laptops is the slow HD and lack of RAM which would cripple any CPU. Give a Celeron 847 an SSD and 4GB+ and it would be fine for most non CPU intensive or gaming tasks. Much better than the P4 for sure.

I've found a surprising number of modern motherboards that boot fine with no video card (and no onboard video). They often give a "no video" error beep, but keep on booting. Try it without any video card.

You didn't have enough RAM. To use deduplication on ZFS without a massive performance hit requires assloads of RAM. 8 GB is nothing to ZFS with dedup on unless your disks are tiny. While Oracle claims less, the FreeBSD guys have found you need at least 5 GB per TB of disk just for dedup, plus more for cache and the rest of the OS. Do the math and any reasonably big storage pool will need tonnes of RAM.

This is completely incorrect. The current Mac Pros use Nehalem based Xeons which are two generations back from the current Ivy Bridge i7s. Xeons may have differences in core count, cache and/or ECC support but their execution units are the same as their desktop equivalents. The base Mac Pro CPU is equivalent to an i7-960 with ECC support. The current Ivy Bridge i7s are a fair bit faster.