Spent the last week trying to recover my desktop, an Alienware, that went dead on me after 2.5 years of use (1.5 years after its warranty expired). I discovered that the watercooling system for the CPU (which was the loudest damn thing I ever heard) failed on me. I also discovered when I tried to reboot the machine before realizing it had failed that the PSU “popped” and killed the motherboard. Rather than having to go and rebuild everything from scratch and have to reinstall all my programs, I bought the same mobo with a new cpu heatsink that was NOT watercooled (though HUGE). I found this new fan to be MUCH quieter even though it was a total pain to install. I got thermal paste everywhere (I’m not very coordinated :-/).
One thing I noticed in this escapade is exactly how DIFFICULT it is to make a bootable CD these days. You see, the mobo I was supplied had a BIOS that was 4 years old. I had to replace it with the latest because I kept getting BSODs every time I loaded into Vista. I was up till 2am trying to create a bootable cd with the appropriate bios update and executable file that would replace the older bios. FINALLY, I got it all working. Total cost?
1 PSU – $200
1 New Fan – $80
1 New MOBO – $70
Cost with tax = $385 
God, computers suck. But this think is running like a dream now. Thank God it didn’t destroy the RAM or processor. Yet.
connect with me!