After a three week long struggle and the escalation of the problem from a dead graphics card to a dead motherboard, I have a working computer again. Well, nearly - Windows XP may start up well when you first install it (I was going to time how long it spent on the Windows logo screen but it disappeared in under a second) but it's easy to forget how stupidly it's set up at first. "Files on C:\ are hidden to prevent damage to your computer" - let me in! I'm not a moron, I've just spent hours putting you together. The memory was the last component out of the string of deliveries I received - it looks very impressive and shiny compared to the circuit board look of my old stuff, and has to have clips around it to contain its power. I don't know.

Despite being an inch bigger the case is pretty much just as crowded as my old one (see diagram), without the nice gap that SATA used to have down there in contrast to the chaos, because that space is taken up by a million different tiny cables for the front panel sockets and case fans. On turning it on for the first time I found that I had not destroyed the motherboard with my overenthusiastic slathering of thermal paste, and that indeed everything worked fine apart from a "Cpu Fan Error!" message. The fan was definitely turning, but I changed where it was plugged in from the three-pin connector that looked correct up at the top corner to the four-pin connector that looked wrong below it, and the problem went away - it seems that only one of the sockets actually allows the motherboard to detect the fan, even if both power it.

To my surprise Windows started up on the old hard drive, but it was so decrepit and confused due to being transplanted into entirely different hardware that I was forced to euthanize it and start over. The contents of my media drive are now borrowing space on Whitney's computer, the media drive itself is now what I'm planning to be a dedicated Windows/application drive, and all my actual data is going to go on the new SATA with a backup plan to a partition of Whitney's monstrous external drive. I have to set up a hundred different applications now, and I notice that the sound doesn't work, but that's not a new problem for me and I'm sure I'll get it with enough fiddling. The only component problem remaining is that apparently computers don't use PS/2 mice any more, along with 939 sockets, IDE drives or DDR2 memory, so I'll have to hunt one of those down. And then I'll be back up and running again.