Thanks for responding Eric! I have decided that *some* device is damaged and frying the mb. At first I thought it might be one of the 3 drives (hd, cd-rom, super floppy), but I've connected all 3 individually to a good, yet expendable machine. Other than Win2k won't run on 32m of RAM, all 3 failed to kill the mb. That's when I started looking to the memory chip or possibly the cpu. According to basic physics, a body in motion will remain in motion until acted upon. Likewise, a working PC tends to remain working until something happens to it. I've ruled out old age or wear and tear as this is a brand new machine. The one and only thing the user did which puts up a red flag in my little brain was to shut off the machine by cutting power to the surge strip it was plugged into. Again, thanks for the empathy and the info ... at least I know I'm not the only one who's run into something like this! - Mary _______________________________________________ techtalk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linux.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/techtalk
