Looks like I'm setting up a new system sooner rather than later. This afternoon my ASUS mobo kicked the bucket. As far as I can tell anyway.

My wife plugged a USB keyboard into the system which brought it down - display stayed up but it was definitely hung. No power to the USB ports as the keyboard would light up nor would the mouse.

I turned the system off at the power supply, waited a bit, turned it back on and then pressed the power button to boot it up. No display, just a voice error message (some ASUS boards have this) telling me that "System fail CPU test"

Tried unplugging all cards, memory and CPU and reseating everything. No luck. Tried a different CPU and same error. Tried a different video card. Same same.

That took maybe 30 to 45 minutes and was all the time I was going to spend.

The first unfortunate part is now I have to spend about CAD$400 on a CPU, mobo, ram and a $50 video card (need to get a plain PCI card as all I have right now are AGP boards). The biggest unfortunate part however is having to reinstall Windows. which is probably going to take the rest of the night if not half the day or longer tomorrow.

This is what I'm about to pick up in an hour or two:

Palit 128MB NVIDIA FX5200 video card (need the S-VIDEO right now) ($50)
Intel Core2Duo 2.66GHz (part E7300 socket LGA775, 1066Mhz FSB) ($155)
Asrock P43Twins1600 (Intel P43/ICH10) ($98)
Crucial Ballistix 2x 1GB DDR2 1066Mhz memory ($66)