Okay. My thinking concerning last night's computer crash turned out to to be as accurate as Bush's grasp of war.

I cleaned off the CPU and the heatsink and added a bit of Arctic Silver thermal stuff to the CPU and clamped 'er all back together. I'm coming to you live and in color from the Panzo 8000!

I learned a valuable lesson, though: spend a steady amount of money on upgrades to your computer because dumping it all out at once is frigging painful.

Had I not been able to pull the Panzo 8000 from the fiery clutches of the Computer Devil, I was looking at spending at least $350 on new parts. In the last three years since I assembled the Panzo 8000, the technology ocean has sea-changed.

While memory is cheap and storage is cheap, CPUs and motherboards are more expensive. I've seen a Gig of 800 MHz PC6400 RAM selling for $30. A new board, though, would have been $180.

SATA 3.0 is now the flavor of the moment for storage transfer protocals - my three IDE drives would have required adapters to run on any of the new boards I was looking at. Even my newish SATA drive is only SATA1.5 and while it would have been backward-compatible with the SATA3.0 headers on the new boards, it would have run slower.

So now I have to buy at least a 250GB SATA3.0 drive and an enclosure with a USB interface so that I can transfer my three hard drives' content to a drive that I'll be able to use when the next crash comes. 'Cause if the Panzo 8000 goes belly-up again, I'm not reviving it...