Thanks for the replies on the power supply threads. I found out that this was not the issue when the board died altogether. After reading good reviews, I ordered an ASRock K7S8XE+ for a mere bongos today. The ASRock site shows it as supporting everything from the 900 Duron to the 3200+, and three slots for DDR, so this seems that it will hang in there for quite a while. Not knowing for certain whether the Sempron 2500 really had that much on the Duron 1300, I decided to stand pat on that for now. I'll snag a faster CPU somewhere down the road. I have a 512DDR that I can now use, so that should give me a nice boost over the 256SDRAM I had in the first place. I plan on slapping in the old video card that I'll still be using. I will try to pull this CPU without removing the heatsink from it (that's what I used to do in the old days, is that still possible?) If it comes apart, what is the best way to clean both sink and chip thoroughly? I seem to remember using rubbing alcohol in the past, but can't say for sure. It is the retail AMD fan that I installed with the little pad. I'll connect the whole shooting match just as it was when the old board died and then pause it right after I do the CMOS setup (defaut BIOS settings or Best Performance or some setting like that to start, I suppose) slap my XP CD in the drive and let it boot to that and tell it to do a repair install. I really would rather not do a fresh install... waaaaaaay too many plug-ins and such that would take days of free time to reinstall. Am I missing anything? Anyone using this board that can give me a heads up on any setup quirks? I see on the ASRock site that it supports just about every Socket A chip made... that must be one heckuva hardware setup window... or is it going to find my Duron and set it up asynchronous with the RAM all by itself? Nothing to do but sit by the mailbox for a few days and wait, and plan I guess.
