It was a Soyo motherboard. But apparently when they sold me the computer it was defective. The owner not being computer savvy never picked up the problem. I did, but by the time I did it was a tad bit too late.

Blue screen of death? Try having a plethora of those. Every day the computer might just throw one at me. The CMOS was not even working properly either so if for some reason I had no energy into it it would reset the BIOS. That was a real pain in the butt.

Then was the problem of the memory incompatibility. The SOYO (I believe KT 477 Platinum Edition) I had was incompatible with the memory I was using (DDR 400 I think) so I had to always and I do mean ALWAYS set up the BIOS to at least diminish the problem. Sometimes the computer would not want to boot… I felt at times like I had it on life support.

Then there was the next issue: AMD Processors tend to get really, really damn hot. And you needed a special thermal compound, not just any compound, for it. Specifically one that had at least silver. God I lost count how many times I clean off the processor and place fresh new thermal to keep it alive to keep it running. I felt like one of those doctors using Electric Shock to keep their patient alive.

Finally I got so fed up with it that I took the motherboard apart after two or so years of this and went and looked for a big metal mallet, the ones you use to break cement walls down. And YES I beat it into a pulp. And got a lot of satisfaction out of it.

Now I got a much better computer

The good news is that the computer I built to replace the fried one is quite nice.

Good to hear the book has been useful – thanks for letting me know!

Your ‘hold music’ on your cell phone is a riot haha

I hope you’re right about never missing that old, archived email… time will tell on that one

Congratulations on the fresh start, anyway. I have been learning a lot from your book about how to tweak my blog. Thanks!