3 beeps on startup

I bought a MAC MINI (early 2009 model) at Future Shop on sale as an open box. It worked fine for the first few months, but I wanted more RAM so I had a local shop do that for me. It worked fine for a year or so, although my use of it was less frequent than I had expected. I recently started using it again as a media server and I ran into what I now know is an extremely common problem -- overheating and forced shut down (message that says you need to shut down by holding the power button.) This does not usually happen while watching video, but rather after a few hours of just letting it sit powered on.

After a few of those, the MAC started failing to reboot. Three beeps with a pause was one of them, and once in a while I got the SOS signal. These are various post errors for ram, hard drive, or whatever. I eventually figured out that by leaving it powered off over night, it would usually reboot again in the morning. I have been forced twice in the last three months to completely reinstall Snow Leopard though, as all the forced shutdowns eventually coirrupted the disk completely.

The first time after the rebuild, the machine ran well for weeks while being left on all the time. But the problems started again a short while later. So I thought up the plan of shutting it down after watching video. Very onconvenient of course, but tolerable. Still, I searched for more answers and found that these machines degenerate pretty often this way. I tried going in and blowing out the dust, and while I was in there I tried installing larger RAM that I happened to have lying around. That gave me the three beeps on startup and nothing I cvould do would change it.

So I reinstalled the original upgraded RAM and the problem continues. In other words, my MAC MINI is now a brick. It is long off warranty and I do not need to pay Apple to tell me that there is some mysterious issue down in the guts.

My question is whether the 3 beeps are ever known to occur when you have a hard drive problem? The overheating is also known to fry hard drives eventually, and so I am wondering if I should consider trying a new drive or SSD in it ... thoughts?

Also, has anyone taken theirs in for service in Canada, and are prices reasonable? I have no interest in paying half the coist again for the same problem to arise later. For that money, I can buy a nice small Windows laptop and be done with this cooling nightmare ...