My machine, nicknamed 44Magnum for the original behemoth tower case it originally had, is once again live. The replacement Biostar motherboard arrived and worked! Well, mostly worked. Perversely, it would not even post as long as I had the new 1GB stick of RAM in it (a Corsair ValueSelect). Seems that the two are not entirely compatible, a discovery I made after reading some of the board's reviews on NewEgg.

Frustration! To make matters worse, after installing Windows XP and then Service Pack 2, the computer took almost 2 full minutes to boot into XP. What's going on? After post, there was a black screen for 15 to 25 seconds. Then the typical Windows ASCII progress bar would appear at the bottom of the screen. But for some reason, the first 5 or so bars took maybe 10 seconds each to advance. Once they were done, the rest filled in virtually no time. Then to top it off, I could not get the LAN to work at all (oops, turns out this was because our router needed the machine's new mac address).

It was all too much. I went to all the local computer parts stores in a vain search for a replacement 478 socket board. And 2 of the 3 I visited were closed. The last, TigerDirect, no longer stocked socket 478. ARGH. I resolved then that I would return the Biostar board and retire the P4 chip.

Instead I looked at my other options for compatibility. I had the new PC3200 1GB stick and my ATI AGP X1650 was only a couple of months old (it was a birthday present). The only other thing that came up was the AMD socket 754 architecture. (There are some 939 boards that have AGP and take 184-pin memory, but they are impossible to find.) With an Athlon 64 3200+, I'd have a machine more or less on par with my original Dell.

The new board came from TigerDirect (an ECS nForce 3). The new processor came from NewEgg (an AMD Athlon 64 3200+, the 3400+ was out of stock). The new case and memory I already had. I put everything together and breathed a ragged sigh of relief.

I ended up swapping out my old primary hard disk because it was accumulating a surprising number of bad sectors. 32MB of bad sectors at last count, out of 160GB. (Actually, I'm just assuming this is a high number. It seems high.) Was this a result of the original Dell board IDE controller going bad or simply a natural deteroriation of this particular drive? Was the Dell with after-market IDE controller actually stable with the exception of this one hard drive? Could I have avoided this whole month of downtime (and all these expenses) by just replacing that one drive? I don't know. I might find out eventually.

Anyway, after some data and drive shuffling, I got the final XP install done. I'm slowly reinstalling the old games and apps I had from before (many won't run without the proper registry entries). My standby benchmark, 3DMark2001, reports that the new 3200+ configuration is a fraction slower than the P4 2.8GHz setup, but only barely. I do now have a bit more memory (1256MB) which should help a bit with some things.

Having this machine back up and running removes a big stressor from my life. Now I can resume my normal relaxation recreations that I was sorely missing (such as BF2142 and BF2), as well as do more work on my personal projects.

I think I can safely say that my sense of taste has fully (or at least close enough to fully) returned. Sense of saltiness and bitterness were the first to recover. The ability to taste sweetness was last and was a long time in coming.

Back in January, I wrote "I'll eat all those vile-tasting 'healthy' foods that I generally avoid." Ironically I think I found myself doing the opposite. Desperate to taste again, I continued to eat junk food, more than normal. I couldn't taste it and I think deep down each one was a hopeful "Maybe this time...." I managed to reverse what up until January had been a slow but steady weight loss, gaining about 7 pounds. Fortunately everything has settled again and I'm on track for losing that weight again. Plus I find it hard to watch the movie 300 and not feel inspired to get in better shape.

New drive errors prompted me to finally face the fact that my dying motherboard was not reliable. Sadly, it's a non-standard Dell board in a non-standard Dell case, meaning I had to replace both board and case at the same time. I decided to retain my existing socket 478 P4 and let me tell you that it is not easy to find a 478 board these days. I ended up going with a mini-ATX Biostar board and I come to find out that my 1 GB of RAM was comprised of four 256 sticks. Mini-ATX boards only have 2 memory slots, grr. More money spent on getting a single GB stick. Also had to get a new heat sink & fan for the CPU, since Dell's was not compatible.

When the Biostar board arrives, it's Dead On Arrival, which is what I feared. Yeah, it was inexpensive, and the reason seems to be that these Biostar motherboards often arrive DOA. It was not unexpected, I was simply hoping it wouldn't be the case. Now I have to ship it back for a replacement and wait even more time for my main machine to be back up and running.

In addition, the new mid-tower case I ordered came with all eight posts that attach the front panel cleanly snapped off. Fortunately NewEgg gave me a good discount on it and I was easily able to epoxy them back on.

A lot of frustration and depression over the whole situation. Fortunately I was able to recover all of my data off the drive that went haywire.

Okay, for the 2 of you who visit this site, you undoubtedly realized that the site was down for quite a while. Pains of switching hosts, sadly. Things seem to be up and running now, so everyone's happy.