Yeah... didn't know that there was paper on the thermal stuff. Ahem ahem... Havn't checked to see if there was. If there was... is it melted to everything now, or should I still be able to repair? Is it good for the heatsink to be put on and taken off like that? It was a bad boy to get on in the first place.
Read the motherboard manual. I feel slightly more knowledgable now... It did help me understand some stuff. I took out all pieces other than needed ones, and swaped video cards once. That means it's either the hard drive, the ram, the power or the processor. Process of elimination is fun.
The funny thing is heatwise, the computer doesn't lock up until it is definatly installing parts of windows. Before when the screen is DOS ish and no pictures, it does fine. It can be on for hours as long as there are no pictures. What does that mean?
Is the flickering screen thing normal when you're at the part of the XP installation where it says "isntalling devices?" Some people have told me that that's not something I should be worried about, and that the restart around the time after it installs the devices points to a driver problem... But sometiems it doesn't actually restart until after that step and into the next one... entering the region settings and registration code... So I'm not sure.
One of these days it will be up and running and I will do a happy dance.
BTW, all this restarting and trying stuff out isn't going to harm anything will it?
Still clueless.