No, smoking is definitely bad for the health of a motherboard... as I found out two days ago.

Somebody who knew, intimately, the former owner of the refurbished box I've had since April (affectionately dubbed "FoxBox Mk II") told me that when it began acting up, that former owner would yank the CPU chip and clean the contacts. When the Norton Firewall stopped loading on start-up - added on to another glitch ot two - I figured it was time to give that a try. Took a while to get to it, in a mini-tower stuffed with ribbon cable and power-supply leads to various peripherals, but I got there. Dismounted the chip fan, pulled the chip, cleaned both, reassembled... crossed my fingers, switched the power on.

* poof * Tiny cloud of smoke and the smell of burnt resistor. Not near the CPU mounting (so maybe the chip itself is still viable?), but just as fatal to the process.

But... ah ha! The person who generously keeps me off the street (and who very sporadically posts here as "Eri") had a spare machine! It had HDD problems, and she'd got a lappy in the meantime, but there it was sitting unplugged in a corner of the room I use. "Hey, it couldn't hurt to try..." - and when I plugged it in, it booted!

It took a while to figure out how the case opened, but eventually I did. So I swapped HDs, and moved the network card from the dead box to the live one. It booted just fine, again, and there were all my files and desktop icons, right where I'd left them... But it didn't recognize anything plugged into the expansion slots! No matter how many times I tried to reload drivers, it just didn't see them. Enough to try the patience of a saint, of which I'm not.

Six hours later, after a phone talk with a real geek (an IT specialist where Eri works), I learned something I hadn't known before: the OS learns its physical environment on first installation, and won't necessarily relearn a new one merely by being moved into it (sounds just like people). He suggested I look for mobo drivers, and maybe even - gulp - "flashing" the BIOS.

I spent quite a few hours yesterday, online on Eri's lappy, discovering that the mobo is too old. The manufacturer doesn't support it any more, and none of the freebie driver dowload sites had anything I trusted. ~sigh~

One more thing to try... first, I found the software for the CD-RW that was conveniently mounted in "Box B", and backed up all my files. Then I rebooted from a 'system' floppy and reloaded the OS. BINGO! Not only did it find all the peripherals, but it suddenly recognized the driver for the video accelerator, giving me back the high rez I was used to. AND - it didn't overrwrite any of the OS upgrades, or revert IE 6 to the IE 5 that was on the disk.

It's a 233MHz PII instead of a Celeron 366, but 128M Ram instead of 96. I can't tell the difference in execution times. Most important, I'm back on the Web without having lost anything of my own.

It appears that you can teach an old Fox new tricks. I just wish I had thought to reload the OS two nights ago...