color me cranky (or "longing for the luxury of a luddite lifestyle")

okay, i'm perplexed. and kinda pissed.

i finally got the capacitors i needed for repairing my motherboard today. i soldered them in this evening, and then put everything back together.

guess what? hey, wow, you're right! how did you know?

clearly, it didn't work. and i have little if any clue what might be wrong now. by outward appearances it seems to be a temperature problem (will work for a short period after having been off for a while, but then starts behaving strangely after running a bit), but the bios thermometer shows both the cpu and the system temperature as well within range.

so far, all i can come up with is that it could be something to do with the video card; the fatal crash usually happens at the moment of a graphical context switch (like trying to display the bootsplash screen). although once there was actually a crc error when loading the kernel, which seems like a faulty hard drive. but if i use a knoppix cd, both hard drives look okay (at least as long as the system lasts), and i don't see why a messed up hard drive would cause problems with a knoppix boot image. i could try disconnecting them completely, but i don't think i can bear to open the case again tonight. it's just too frustrating. if it's a hard drive problem, interestingly enough, that's probably one of the better cases, since the hard drives are the only things in there that are still under warranty...

but what else is there, really? could it be a memory problem? the ram checks out fine during bootup, even the last time, right before it fails. i suppose the processor might be damaged, but i'm having a hard time imagining how it could work sometimes but not others like it's doing. or maybe the busted capacitors on the motherboard blew something else up, in a less visually obvious manner. this would be really shitty, since most things that could break i doubt if i'll be able to fix or even find.

i dunno. i'm just supremely annoyed right now. if anybody has any bright ideas, now's the time. thanks.