Paul Rogers wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 RJT> Yep,  Looks like I'm gonna be shopping for some hardware again today.
 RJT> :-(

 PR> Gee, Roy, some folks have ALL the fun!

Oh yeah,  the virus taking up residence in my lower abdomen was much of the fun, too.

 PR> Got a couple Socket 7 motherboards here, both with batteries too! 
 PR> ;-) 

As I recall,  though,  those were both ATX boards,  weren't they?  Or at
least the one was.  And I don't happen to have a functioning ATX power
supply here at the moment.  Lots of AT supplies,  though.

And the battery wasn't the problem. With a fairly good one in there
(measured 3.12V on that "3v" cell) the board _still_ wouldn't
save anything you tried to put in there in CMOS Setup,  so some chip is
fried.

Further investigations have revealed some more fun.  The K6-200 CPU chip I
have here is toast.  I had it in there in a different board,  running
memory test software,  and I got an error.  Thought at that point that it
was going to be a matter of finding out which of the two "upper"
SIMM modules was the problem, but leaving it run for a while showed me the
same error at other, lower addresses.

Left it run for a few hours,  and I got a total of close to 250 errors, 
all of them the _same_ bit error -- bad L1 cache,  it looks like?  So I
pulled that chip out and put the P200 I also use in there instead,  finding
to my astonishment that it had only 16K of L1 cache as opposed to the 64K
that the AMD part had,  and *very* different memory speeds indicated. 
After three hours of running that,  there were _no_ errors showing,  so I
guess my ram is okay.

But the last time I tried to bring the machine up,  a little bit ago,  it
won't boot.  At all.  Gets to the bootup screen,  finds the cdrom drives, 
and then hangs.  So it does look like maybe I have two bad MBs here after
all.

Whoops!  Just tried it again,  after letting sit there off for a while, 
now it tries to boot,  I get "loading..." (from the floppy?) and
then it resets and starts all over again.  Still sick.  Only this time it
got past the point it'd stopped at before and now displays the "System
Configuration" box and is hung...

Oh well.  I guess we get to see what kind of warranty the local junque
store is gonna offer me,  if any.

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