That post title is a vague comic-strip rendition of the curse I emitted when, in attempting to get my machine to reboot after freezing, and getting only a series of long on/off beeps, and repeatedly removing and replacing the half meg of RAM in an attempt to get it working again, one of the end clips popped off the socket.

So much for that mobo.

I didn't need this. I particularly didn't need this after moving to Florida, thousands of miles from the nearest Fry's. I even more particularly didn't need this after considering that a new mobo will require a Windows reinstallation, and the disk is still packed away somewhere.

But I suppose this is a good excuse to finally finish unpacking office stuff, and attempt to organize it.

Fortunately, it's not my only machine, but it does have some data on the drive that I'd like access to pronto.

Anyone know a good place to buy a motherboard in Boca Raton and environs? I haven't noticed any computer places here that hold a candle to Fry's (or PC Club, or other similar places in California).

[Update]

D'oh!

That's half a gig, not half a meg of RAM. The machine isn't that old.

Rand, In case you haven't seen it yet, SpaceDev has announced a partnership with NASA Ames to build its own suborbital vehicle.

Dream Chaser

Well, Rand, you're not thousands of miles from the nearest Fry's anymore. One just opened up here in Atlanta, so that knocks it down to hundreds of miles.

But I suppose you'd rather skip the road trip. Though I don't know of any good places to walk into and buy a mainboard in Florida, I've had good luck ordering online from NewEgg (www.newegg.com). Their prices are pretty good and many items have free shipping.

BTW, half of a meg of RAM? How old is this computer, anyways? :-)

Only a "half meg of RAM"? I'm not sure you can buy replacement mobos for the old Macintosh 512k's anymore. ;-)

Seriously, though, depending on how long you can afford to wait, etc., Newegg.com has some great prices, quick shipping, etc. As much as I like to support local business, when it comes to building a PC, a 25-30% savings over local prices is enough to "lure" me away...

And, if you know the exact mobo you need, it's fairly easy to find on newegg.

Er.. you dont have to reinstall win with new mobo, i have successfully replaced mobos for win2k, xp and 9x win installations. It takes some tinkering with 2k/xp but its possible.
Besides, if you need the machine working ASAP, just pop in a disk of Knoppix or MandrakeMove or something.

Yea that does suck, last week one of my HDD blew out on my RAID 0 array and totally had to rebuild. Fortunately a little program called winternals was able to boot off a cdrom. Its a really cool program that runs a software emulated HDD controller and it let me move stuff off the array onto another computer on the network before wiping everything.

Ideally you'd want an oppurtunity to run sysprep before swamping mobo's then that forces windows xp to rebuild its HAL (hardware abstraction layer) from scratch.

Another way though would be to swap boards and then boot off the windows xp cd and run a windows xp repair installation to freshen up your current install.

Or, if you want to wipe the drive. Then physically attach the HDD to another computer as a slave drive and the copy everything you want over. Then jumper it back as a primary and build your new board up and reinstall from fresh. I'd probably do this seeing as going other routes tends to cause other wierd problems down the road.

Windows XP?

I run 2000.