Argh. Over the last few days I've had my 'media center' pc take a dump on me compliments of a crappy little chipset fan that apparently just couldn't keep up with the load on same, only to wind up ordering a replacement motherboard and cpu (and RAM) that unfortunately looks like it is going to be forcing me to do yet more upgrading since it doesn't have 2 IDE controllers/connectors on it (one and only one 
) and I had been continuing to rock on with two fairly good sized IDE drives plus two DVD+/-RW drives in the system that were also IDE based.
Well, on top of those issues, I finally got everything neatly installed in the case, connected up all of the required cables and connections and hit the power button for the initial boot up (even though I know I'm going to need to get either a hard drive or an IDE controller) only to hear that horrible and heartbreaking sound that I'm betting some of you all have heard:
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeep, beep, beep
R'uh r'oh. R'orry R'eorge, it seems that something is wrong.
It didn't take too long to find the culprit. One bad DIMM that I'm sure I'm now going to have to return to the manufacturer. Ouch. Oh well, at least could run with one for now if forced to.
As it turns out, I think I'm going to leave the box offline until I can get both more RAM and a new drive or at least an IDE controller to use so I can keep using the drives I have. What a p-i-t-a. At least I'll get nearly twice the speed out of the new box compared to the old one. Anyone want to buy a 'slightly' used motherboard and CPU? (Just kidding, just kidding.... don't want to sell my old problems to someone else, though I may, just may, clean up the old CPU for sale. I'm fairly certain the CPU was fine and it was just the stupid mobo that was causing all my grief over the last week or two.)
