So, last week we had a storm. My UPS's were beeping so I got up and shut down my systems. The next evening when I got home I came to discover my system wouldn't boot up. Trial and error seem to indicate a power supply issue. Off to Fry's and one Antec 650 Watt power supply later my system was powering up.

My son then asked what was wrong with his system.... The system that was working before we left for Fry's. Nice boot screen with the white on black letters, "Hard disk failure, insert boot disk to continue". Oh joy. Found a hard disk on the shelf, started to load the OS. System died. Sigh. Dug another old system out (his was a P500) and loaded it up. Yay! It works. All he needs to do is surf the kids sites and his game.

Back to mine. Power up but no video, error codes are mysterious. Eventual conclusion, when the power supply went so did my motherboard and CPU. Back to Fry's.

Picked up an Intel motherboard and CPU, CPU fan. Got it all assembled. OS loaded. YAY! Back online. Fire up World of Warcraft, spontaneous reboot. What?!

Eventual testing leads to the ever popular memtest. Memtest runs great for a while but eventually the system just locks up. I am hoping that it is a memory problem as replacing the motherboard again is going to be a serious pain . Off to Fry's with the memory and receipt.

[update - New memory seems to have fixed the random reboot issues with the new system parts]