Dave,
Before my suggestion... just a quick note of moral support... Please
don't let it get you down too much. Think about all the may times
there's a (seemingly impossible) problem and how it always works out in
the end. And we all seem to learn so much from these things.
Ok... So... It's not the mother board... It's not the Power supply.
You're getting there. How about buying new ram, putting the old ram in
static safe packaging. If the problems go away... Then you only paid for
ram. Beats buying a whole system.
And as people mentioned, not all memtests detect bad ram anyways. So if
problems still occure with new ram, you now have extra ram. I have tons
of "parts" and many times have been able to use some later. If the (old)
ram proves good, maybe you can use it for a machine you're building for
a friend, (or your next machine). Same with Hard drives... replace...
test... and if problems still occure, you now have extra drives (I'm not
helping am I... hehe). You can save tons of money by building a system
from scratch. So extra drives and ram are good in that way.
Btw... I see they have "cases" for IDE drives to convert them into usb
drives. Don't know if you have a use for them, but I use them to back up
drives. This is good because they aren't connected to computer (so
electric storm can't fry your back up drive). I have two so that there's
always one that's not hooked up to the computer. Haven't tried the
IDE/USB "cases", so I can't vouch for them.
It's amazing what could cause a problem. My brother tore my sister's
machine apart and replaced "this" and "that" and after all, it was the
bad sound card that was causing (both) windows (and) linux to crash.
Prior to that, I had no clue a soundcard could cause 2 OS's to crash.
And now (for instance) if I hear a soundcard making weird sounds, I'll
know to watch for weird system behavior. So at least we learn things.
I've had 2 Maxtor drive fail on me. I will never buy Maxtor drives again.
Good luck
Rocco