(Yes, this is another dupe from LJ. I'll get back into regular journal writing soon-ish, but I'm dealing with back-to-back exams at the moment.)

With much help from Josh yesterday, the PC seems to be up and running. The replacement mobo didn't display the random flakiness of the one I got in the first place.

Of course, I haven't updated to WinXP SP2 because there's apparently a problem with USB2 controllers using VIA chipsets that causes them to vanish from the system with no way of reenabling them once you update to SP2. Looks like I'll have to wait until a fix for that problem is done before I upgrade...

Aside from a new mobo and a different CPU (now using an Athlon XP 1700+ rather than an Athlon Thunderbird 1.4ghz), I also ended up putting in a Plextor PX-712A to supplement the Pioneer DVR-106D. I haven't tried burning anything yet, but the Plextor really does dwarf the Pioneer in many ways (not surprising since the Pioneer drive is much older). I'm also no longer using the PCI IDE controller, which did cause a bit of a problem with the 250gb HDD - which I'm still not quite sure is working properly. (I didn't think I'd run into LBA48 problems with a brand new mobo...) A few files got corrupted before I tried installing an updated IDE driver (which doesn't show up in Device Manager for some reason), but I haven't run into problems with it since.

I also need to do some more tests on the mobo's onboard sound (a C-Media AC97 chipset, apparently) before I decide to keep using that, or to go ahead and put the SB Live! back in.

The only other minor issue is that the power LED connector didn't fit the mobo - the mobo only has 2 pins for that for some reason, when the connector is 3 pins. Other than that, I'm just dealing with having to reinstall and re-register all my software again. I'm also going to need to pick up a new video card in the near future, as this is (probably) a loaner. (Thankfully, I'll just be going from one ATI card to another, and ATI's drivers have been unified for quite some time...)