Computer go boom-ish

Those who get queasy from reading tech shit MUST LEAVE NOW

Wow, cool!

The primary IDE controller on my computer went belly-up, so now I can't boot (unless I keep trying for twenty minutes, and then wait a full TEN minutes for the boot to complete). Yay!

I'll try taking out the optical drive & see if it'll boot from the secondary controller more easily until I scrape up funds to get a new motherboard ... and CPU, since Socket A is a tad long in the tooth (so much so that I doubt it's been produced in a good two or three years). Anyone know someone that can use a working Athlon 1.2GHz Thunderbird series CPU? I'll even include the all-copper heat sink. Waste not, want not, don'cha know.

I could go budget & get a newer mobo that still supports AGP so I can keep my video card. Even so, I'd need new memory since my PC133 chips aren't going to fit anything new. I've got a pair of 128M sticks if anyone wants 'em (the 256M stick is spoken for). I think I'll splurge as much as I can though; I like games.

I'd thought about going to Dell/HP & the like for a new system (yes, even Apple, but I've got too much $$ in PC software to justify that migration). The thing is, I have many components that are fairly new and working great. Why get another optical drive, case & all when I have those already? I suppose I'm just not a true consumer. Oh well.

ANYway, I'm shopping for pieces parts. This does make me all kinds of happy. Now I've just gotta pare down the "nice to have" (I do wish the MSI K8N Diamond Plus wasn't so damned popular) to the "need to have" (I've not forgotten the need for a new power supply).

...

Follow-up: Booting from the secondary IDE does indeed work just fine, though I continue to get a brief delay while chkdsk does its thing. Every. Time. I. Boot. So yeah, a replacement is in the works.
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Psyclon Nine, You Know What You Are