Babbage Failing

The machine that I had in residence is getting closer and closer to retirement. Today I rebooted it (after 22 days uptime) to switch over to a new kernel I installed a couple days ago. Upon attempting to start, the kernel panicked with the following:
"kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)"
According to Google, this is commonly caused by hard disk drivers not being loaded into the kernel (eg. raid, serial ata, and reiser). Seeing as how I am using ext3 on parallel ATA on a pretty standard motherboard, I think it is highly unlikely that Ubuntu doesn't have my drivers compiled into the kernel. I have been known to have hard drive problems in the past. Put in Ubuntu Live, backed up some stuff, then started playing around to see if I could fix it. I decided to try running Memtest just to see what it would have to say. I've never seen Memtest return an error on my hardware before, but this time I'm looking at around 60 bad memory blocks around the 86MB area of my ram. Judging by NCIX, the going rate for PC133 ram is about 4x that of everything else. It would cost me around $100 to replace the ram in Babbage, while a new computer can be had for around $350. With the unreliability of the whole machine, I'm thinking I should just get something new for September. I will use Babbage until August, and buy a computer then, hoping that new computers come down by a couple price points. My next machine will also be fully researched for Linux compatibility in the hardware.

Sorry for any spelling mistakes, I'm typing on qwerty again.