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!