I got back on to my latest build-it-yourself computer today. It's nowhere near cutting edge (AMD Athlon 850 CPU), but the price was right for the systemboard and processor. I had it sitting half-finished under my old (AMD K6 overclocked to 335mhz) system for several months, and since I had a day off today, I decided to finish it up. Pulled the old Packard Bell monitor from the 486sx-25 upstairs in the spare room, installed the 80 gig Western Digital drive I bought for it six months ago. Installed the CD-ROM and was ready to go

RIGHT.

Started to install Windows 2000 pro, but it would never format the drive, kept giving me "unformatted or damaged" for all the partitions. also was taking a long time to create the partitions. Tried this for a couple of hours. Ok, pulled out my Win98SE boot diskette and tried to fdisk the drive. Got the "Read error on drive" error. Made dinner and went to Micro Center got a new 80 gig Samsung. Put it in and was able to install Win2K. Then loaded the driivers for the nVidia GeForce2 MX400 I originally put in it and rebooted.

Got a series of vertical lines on the monitor. Had to reboot Win2K and go into VGA mode to see the anything, was working ok, just would not work in any other mode. Deleted and reinstalled several times. Swapped monitors and got the same thing.

Sigh.

I guess I'll have to make another trip to Micro Center tomorrow for a new video card. That's $100+ of worthless components.