BANG!!!

I spent all day Wendsday wiping Windows ME off my grandfather's computer and replacing it with Windows 2000, then reinstalling all his software and setting everything up for him. A nice, perfect install.

Thursday I was demonstrating the new setup to him, and made the comment, "See how much faster and more stable it is now?"

And immediately the system froze.

This is not good. I've had very little trouble with Windows 2000, so I knew it wasn't a Windows problem. I thought maybe the video drivers were wonky (I was using the Microsoft drivers), because I'd seen this before with this video card under NT, so I downloaded the latest reference drivers from nVidia.

It seemed to be OK, but then locked up again after about 30 minutes.

This is very odd. I rebooted, and this time it locked up within 5 minutes and started beeping loudly.

Oh $#|+! I frobbed the power switch as fast as I could and yanked off the cover. I poked at the CPU fan with a screwdriver, and sure enough, it was frozen solid. And it's an AMD system too, no nice overtemp protection like the Intel CPUs have.

I rush down to the local computer store and buy a new heatsink, get it attached, and power up the machine.

<font size="5">BANG!!!</font> The magic smoke begins pouring out of the motherboard.

I didn't even try restarting the system, I just said, "Time for a new motherboard!"

Worst thing is that Windows 2000 hates swapping motherboards, so I'm probably going to have to reinstall everything ALL OVER AGAIN! :mad:

Wow, feel your pain. Sorry to hear that. At no fault of anyone's but my own, I had a similar case with an older computer. I had just built an AMD K6-2 450. One of the hottest computers at the time. I had gotten a new motherboard for it and hooked everything up. Unfortunately, there were two different jumpers on horizontal, one vertical next to each other on the motherboard. One of them was to set it to either AT or ATX power supply. The way they were setting next to each other, the top pin of the vertical jumper looked like the last pin on the horizontal jumper giving it 4 pins instead of 3. Unfortunately, I did not pay close enough attention and fused the two together with one jumper. OOPS. Power up, beep, beep, bee-BANG, whoosh, fizzle, spark, "HOLY SH*T" That's about as verbose as I can be as to the sounds made. That was an expensive lesson back in the day.

i hate when that happens ,...... :(

Why do I always get the warped ones?