OK, so computers still drive me crazy, but sometimes I manage to get the upper hand, for a while at least...
If I may horribly trash my metaphors, the Frankenstein computer has once again risen from the ashes of its previous demise, or perhaps to stick better to the myth, with a couple of replacement parts, you can get almost anything back up and working again...
It took another trip to eBay to get a replacement motherboard (that, and another $43 with shipping), but with that in hand, I was able to fairly quickly move over all the other parts (CPU, SCSI card, NVIDIA video, etc), and get the system up and running again. This time, happily, the board was able to fit in to an old VAIO case someone had given me. I had to use a hack-saw to get the power supply to fit right, but I've done worse. The MB is a Shuttle AV49PN, which has lots of neat features, most of which I'm not using yet (e.g., SATA support), but which may be handy in the future. One quirk is that I can't seem to get it to overclock the 2GHz processor. The old motherboard, before it bit the dust, was running at a cool 2.666GHz, which is a pretty significant boost. However, even at the rated 2GHz, it's pretty snappy (compared to a dual 500MHz PIII), and the CPU should last longer.
So, I now have a system where I can play some games on, and almost keep up with my son Sam playing Enemy Territory.
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