So apparently, I've been on the Computer Gods' Shit-List for the past two weeks or so. Probably had something to do with all my waving of the middle finger in their general direction during my time. I figured we were past all that, but apparently they hold grudges.

Anyway, after fighting with TopDawg for the past week, I've discovered a few things:

• The ASUS board causes some hard drive weirdness - usually resulting in a bad block or sector in the primary boot partition. This caused the installation of whatever OS I attempted to lock up and hang the machine when it hit bad block/sector.
• The heatsink that came with the AMD 7750 I bought this week absolutely sucks and is completely inadequate. After swapping the 'old' heatsink from the AMD 5000 I originally had for this machine, things cooled down immensely inside the box.
• The MSI board has crappy audio, but at least it runs. Maybe I'll snag an add-on sound card somewhere.
• I can literally change out the motherboard and internals on this machine in the dark. My computer room is almost a cave when the lights are off, and I was just fed-up enough with having to swap back to the MSI mobo that I didn't even bother with the lights. I did cheat and use an LED Mini-Mag for the front panel connections to the mobo though.

Basically, I'm guessing I received a bad motherboard almost 18 months ago when I originally built this machine for my pal Mike. The 'symptoms' (as I call them) migrated from the ASUS mobo to the MSI through the hard drive because when the ASUS would crap out, it would leave the bad block/sector on the hard drive. When I would use the hard drive with the MSI mobo, the bad block/sector was already there, and since I had data on it, I wasn't willing to repair and format the whole thing. The original hard drive I thought might've been bad has been repaired and is running like a champ in BigDawg (who's waiting to become my next webserver... another story of having pissed off the Computer Gods).

Right now, I've got TopDawg running on a Windows 7 Beta, which I intended to upgrade to the RC and snag a copy of 7 Ultimate when it goes on sale. I guess I need to run the hot-rod with a new OS, but my old junk can just swing with whatever's leftover. Win2K Adv Server and XP have served me faithfully for many years now, and I can't see the reason to quit using them for project machines just because Microsoft has quite supporting the OS - I rarely use Windows Updater to manage my junk anyway.

But for now, so far - so good. We'll see how long this all runs with Win7 Beta. If it blows up, everything except the case and my data gets thrown out and I build a hot-rod Ubuntu box and call it good.