The Nemesis...

...Of all custom computer's. Why won't it turn on!!

I was in big trouble. I had just purchased all this brand new equipment, but nothing worked! So, I went online to the Asus Forums for the P5N-E SLI and enlisted their help.

"Its your 4-pin plug! Did you plug it in?" Of course.

"Its your memory! Is it on the QVL list?" Yes, but I didn't know that till I had ordered another stick of the same memory.

Ok, enough with that. I had played around with this thing for almost a week to get it to work. Even tried RMA'ing the board, but the people at Fry's got it to work? COME ON!!

So I sat down and studied the board for hours thinking over all the possibilities. Then something struck me. I just set the heatsink on the cpu. I didn't attatch the brace. And you know what? It worked!!

How the heck? Then I remembered what my dad kept telling me about my board problems, "It sounds like a short, Dan." I looked at my metal brace and where it touched the Asus board. Then I looked a the back of my original Intel board. There was a thick sticky substance on it. Doing!! Light bulb!! My METAL heat sink brace wasn't shielded from the back of my Asus board!!

I ran into my dad's room, interrupting his hundreth odd rerun of a episode of M*A*S*H, asking the question "How do I shield my board from the brace?" He said the best thing to do is put some Kapton tape over it. This tape is non conductive and is used in a lot of electrical applications. So I put on the tape and turned the system on and it worked.

Sometimes the hardest problems have the simplest answers. DUH!! But I wasn't going to stick with that P4 for much longer. I was anxious to move into the 21st century...