After a long time I managed to get my computer working again.Two months ago my mainboard decided to no longer boot Windows, mainly due to expanding capacitors. Originally I didn't know that and I assumed that the hard disk is malfunctioning (being the previous owner of two IBM harddisks have taught me that better safe than sorry, although I didn't lost my data), so I bought a new Western Digital 250GB hard-disk. After waiting almost a week, I found that even if I changed the harddisk, the symptoms are the same, so the this wasn't the cause. I knew that my mainboard capacitors started to expand, but I never thought that the computer will hang and after reboot it will stop working, I assumed that firstly it will start randomly crash and eventually will die, but it turned out that this is not the case.
So I started to look after new mainboard. I had/have a Socket A Epox board (8KRA2+ if it matters), and I had two options: either find another similar board, or renew my computer to a more recent CPU. After browsing the sites, I could not find a interesting Socket AM2 board (particularly I was looking for a few things: VIA chipset and Firewire on board and no onboard graphics, and don't ask why I want VIA chipset, simply I do not like NVidia on the chipset side, a matter of personal taste), and I searched the Epox Store for another 8KRA2+. Well I found a refurbished 8KRA2+ for a lovely almost 38 bucks. But boy, their S&H is almost 10 dollars. Updating to a AM2 socket would mean a new CPU - ~160$ at that time the cheapest, a new board (not to expensive), a new 1 GB of DDR2 memory, a new graphics board as AGP isn't in style these days and so on. Way out of my budget. So I bought the refurb board and waited to receive it, another few days.
If you think that this is the happy end you are plain wrong. After receiving the refurb board the nightmare begun. Board started to hang randomly, after a few minutes to few hours. Who knows me might call very well "do not reboot guy", so for me it was pretty annoying to see that the medium time between reboots went down from 12 days to below 7 days in just a week. The hang was so deep, that I had keep the power button pressed for 4 seconds to be able to reset it, as the reset button didn't do it's job while the board locked up. So after another 1 week of diagnosting with Epox support, trying to rule out the possible incompatibility between WD HDD SATA II with the VIA KT600 chipset, I decided to RMA the board. Few days ago I received a new board that works and I'm pretty happy with it. So for almost 55 dollars (including a Fedex ship for RMA) I have my computer working again. I'm not including in this the new HDD, I wanted to upgrade it anyway.
So right now I should be back in business and blog more frequent.