Neat, the power supply I picked out yesterday went on sale AND had a rebate start today, so $25 instead of $50. I was debating a full refresh versus just getting the thing going again, and had to step back and realize that this machine is at least twice the machine I actually need, so I should just get it going again. 4 cores and 4GB of RAM is vastly more than I need 98% of the time, and is perfectly adequate the rest of the time. Heck, 98% of the time the old single core machine with 1GB of RAM is plenty, though the RAM is a bit skinny.
Once I decided to just fix, I realized that all of the socket 775 / DDR2 mainboards used the Intel G31 chipset, and they all look like they were designed straight from the Intel Reference sheet, so it hardly matters which one I grab. I picked the ASRock at $40. There was a Jetway at $38 but bad reviews, and 4 or 5 others for between $45 and $90. I guess ASRock is Asus plus some other company merged. I'll give them a try.
I think this is the first time I've had a mainboard fail on a clone that I built. Up until now the only thing I've really ever had fail was equipment that came on a purchased PC. We had some RAM fail on the family's current Dell last year, and last week the power supply on it failed (this power supply is to replace that one, it's currently running an underpowered spare out of an old Compaq). I had a hard drive fail that shipped with a Compaq a few years back. I had a mainboard on a laptop fail once. We had the hard drive on Kate's laptop fail last year. I can't recall ever having any parts fail that I'd installed afterward on purchased PCs, or any on machines that I built, except if they had been damaged by external forces (lightning, dropping).
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