Thinking hard about upgrading on a budget

[Virtualbody1234]

What steps have you taken to decide that you need a new mobo?

What I mean is, it could be something else causing the problem.

Have you cleared the CMOS? Have you tried booting with minimal parts installed ie: only the PSU, mobo, CPU, RAM and graphics card? Try interchanging each of those components with known good ones. Check all connections by removing and reinserting components and connectors.

[Chewie]

Unplugged everything including CPU, RAM & gfx card and I don't even get a beep - with two previously working PSUs. Unless the spare PSU went faulty sitting in a box doing nothing, it must be the mobo.

I've gotten fed up doing nothing about this, and ordered the CPU, with a cheaper mobo and gfx card from the site above. £388 on finance. Hopefully the finance will go through and I'll have something to do in the evenings from the end of next week.

Just realised how dodgy it is to keep myself logged on at FST while I'm at work due to the Mod status and untrustworthiness of some colleagues!

[Chewie]

Bugger it! I was refused the finance. That's not good at all.

Went to a computer fair yesterday and there was only one Socket A board that I could move my Sempron to, a Soltek SL-75FRN2-RL. That's a bit of a coincidence as my old board was the SL-75FRN2-L... the same thing but without SATA RAID.
There wasn't even the usual £30 ASRock or ECS to go for.
I had no choice but to pay the £50 asking price; told the guy my old board only cost £52 years ago but he just said it's been reduced from £75, implying I should be happy.

Spent about 8 hours installing it, repair-installing XP and getting it running right. It took so long cos the XP install was freezing until I unplugged my dying 200GB HDD and because the BIOS needed upgrading to recognise the CPU, so it was effectively an Athlon 1.0GHz until I'd been to the Soltek site.

It BSODed last night and I'm worried about the RAM; it's at 200MHz (it is PC3200) but had been running it at 166 on the old board for some dumb reason I forget... possibly BSODing at 200MHz!
Jeez, it never rains but it pours, eh?

[Virtualbody1234]

It sounds like the PSU isn't able to provide enough power. Could that be why the it won't work with 200GB drive?

[Chewie]

EZ-Cool 600W Silent

I bought it because I thought it was the old PSU that was clicking like a car's indicator... ker-TICK, ker-TICK, ker-TICK, ker-TICK...
Turned out that it's the data hdd doing it.
Even more annoying, I was desperate and paid £49.95 some weeks ago and now see them regularly on sale for £20-£25.

0x8e BSODs have continued tonight (sometimes with various dlls quoted but most with none) until I dropped the memory to 166. It passed Memtest86 at 200 but I'm wondering if the almost identical DIMMS just don't get on with the nforce dual channel idea.
I think I'll re-arrange them to run in the standard configuration and see what happens at 200 then.