New drive errors prompted me to finally face the fact that my dying motherboard was not reliable. Sadly, it's a non-standard Dell board in a non-standard Dell case, meaning I had to replace both board and case at the same time. I decided to retain my existing socket 478 P4 and let me tell you that it is not easy to find a 478 board these days. I ended up going with a mini-ATX Biostar board and I come to find out that my 1 GB of RAM was comprised of four 256 sticks. Mini-ATX boards only have 2 memory slots, grr. More money spent on getting a single GB stick. Also had to get a new heat sink & fan for the CPU, since Dell's was not compatible.

When the Biostar board arrives, it's Dead On Arrival, which is what I feared. Yeah, it was inexpensive, and the reason seems to be that these Biostar motherboards often arrive DOA. It was not unexpected, I was simply hoping it wouldn't be the case. Now I have to ship it back for a replacement and wait even more time for my main machine to be back up and running.

In addition, the new mid-tower case I ordered came with all eight posts that attach the front panel cleanly snapped off. Fortunately NewEgg gave me a good discount on it and I was easily able to epoxy them back on.

A lot of frustration and depression over the whole situation. Fortunately I was able to recover all of my data off the drive that went haywire.