The bad motherboard story was never posted and I really didn't care much about having to update because I hated that motherboard!! We'll skip that one for now.
The bad floppy drive was reported, that was a real pisser. I still haven't bought a sledgehammer to smash it with. I still do have the drive though, waiting to borrow a sledgehammer and my mother-in-law's camcorder!
The speaker incident was kinda stupid, but I also hated those speakers. Basically that one was an excuse for the wife, hell she's happy with my old speakers!
Here is some background to the story:
With my recent upgrade, the boy's now have other systems. William was getting a P3 I had sitting around. The fan for the CPU was making some noise and I didn't like it so I replaced it. Everything was fine.
I had bought a stick of RAM from eBay a few weeks back and tested it on 2 systems, it would not work. So I requested a refund, luckily that seller was very good, nice, and wanted to keep his 100% feedback rating. I did not threaten him in anyway, I was extremely decent about it. I'm sure he understood if the situation wasn't fixed he would get negative feedback.
I left William's computer next to my desk for about the last week because I didn't have time to finish up. Memory was sitting in one of my drawers.
Today
I put the memory back in. Hooked it all up and it wouldn't boot?? What the heck? In the back of my head I though check the CPU, but the fan would start so I thought nothing of it. I just bought and installed the new fan so it should still be ok, right? I pulled all the RAM, reconnected all cables, etc., etc. Everything you would normally check. Then I finally thought, what the heck! I wiggled the new fan on the CPU a little and tried to boot again. HELLO XP!
So the moral to the story. Listen to the little voice in the back of your head, just because you did something a few days (or weeks) ago doesn't mean it's still all good. Just follow your troubleshooting like normal, anything can happen. In this case, one of my cats was probably playing a little bit or someone kicked the case when walking by.