All mourn for my PC.

It led a good if hard life. It performed it's duties well. We will miss this PC as it is sent to the great beyond but we are wealthier people for having it in our lives. You are remembered fondly, good machine, may your legacy live on.

My motherboard died last night. Dead, kaput. No post, nada, nothing at all. I spent pretty much all last night making certain that the motherboard was the problem, taking components out one by one, etc... and I am certain it is the board itself. This is a setback for me, no new video cards for this one, time for a new motherboard. I see there is a good deal on an AMD 2100+ processor and an Asus A7V266 motherboard near by that may be affordable by me. I'll check on that.

And no I am not getting something top of the line, some suprisingly high new bills ($350 bucks for 3 fillings this morning amoung others, that hurt) I can't afford the latest and greatest but I can get the proccessor motherboard combo for just a tad over $200. If I am right the A7V266 is a very close relative to the A7M266 board I had so it may not require a reinstall of the OS. That would be nice. The faster processor would be nice too.

IIRC, "M" series motherboards use AMD chipsets while "V" series motherboards port VIA chipsets. So, odds are you'll have a good time doing the upgrade without a reinstall of your OS... Sorry to hear about your machine... Make sure that the funeral pyre is mighty so that it might find a fine resting place with the gods.

The "M" series is a hybrid of AMD and VIA chipsets.

If I need to do a reinstall I was sort of thinking of trying out the old Sysprep utility and seeing if that would do. Most likely I will just try to get into the machine in safe mode then reinstall XP since that is not that big of deal, well that is if I have a second hard drive to move my backup data to around somewhere (I gave away most of my older stuff to some poor friends of mine). If I loose everything currently on the hard drive it will not be world-ending but I would be loosing my Neverwinter nights saved games and some other little things like my library of downloaded drivers.

Oh well. I shall see.

Well, I got the new motherboard last night and made sure the processor at least still worked in the store. Then I brought it home screwed it in powered up and was pleasantly suprised to have it boot. I went into safe mode and backed up what files I needed to onto an old 500M hard drive I had.

Then, after shutting it down and trying to rearnge the cords in the machine when I went to power it back up... nothing. No power at all. The LED on the board itself would not even light. Without another ATX power supply I can't be 100% sure but I am pretty sure the power supply just up and died on me. That MAY have been the cause of the last failure. My only hope is that if it is just the power supply I can only hope that it did not fry anything this time. It probably did.

I just spent my last penny (literaly) on the new motherboard and if it is fried then I am going to have to say good bye to gaming for at least 2 months as that is when I can afford some stuff again. If it is just the power supply I may (big may) be able to be running after the paycheck next friday but since rent comes out of that I don't expect to be fixed by then.

This is pretty catastrophic and with my money problems of late it makes it doubly so. I may be saying good bye to home computing for some time.

I don't want to falsely get your hopes up, Wid, but I might have a spare ATX power supply around taking up space. If I can find it, I'll fire you off an e-mail (and my girlfriend will thank you for helping me un-clutter ;))

And on that same note, I know I have a POS Athlon motherboard that I bought when I thought my current mobo was toasted. It's not exactly top of the line, and I didn't have much luck with it, but maybe you can succeed where I failed. Give me a shout on the e-mail or ICQ this weekend and I'll see what I can do to help you out.

I brought my computer into work to troubleshoot tonight. We have some systems around here that I plan on hooking one of the ATX power supplies up to my machine to see if the computer is still working. I don't have real high hopes of that.

If the power supply is dead I believe I can get a new one at Best Buy where I have some gift certificate money at (a gift from work for 5 years of service). If anything else is dead then... boom... that is it for me for a while.

I tested the power supply by shorting pins 14 and 15 on it (the power on switch) to see if the fan would at least start up. Nothing. The power supply is definetly dead... I just hope it did not sink anything else along with it.