Hi there,
Right at new years eve of Iranian calendar (21st March 2010), and the start of the spring, my computer shut down and never turned on again 
I didn’t want to rush to fix it, as everything is being rushed here just like what happens at the Christmas eve, so I thought I have to put myself on computer-rehab for the holidays, and I did. Well, I used my mobile phone to connect to internet sometimes
After a week, as soon as shops opened, I went to the market, bought a new main board (GA-EP45-UD3L), a core2 duo E5300 Intel processor (I have been stayed with AMD since 5, 6 years ago), and 2GB of DDR2 dual channel RAM.
Seems not much, but I didn’t want to consume a lot as the old main board can be repaired for about 12USD and I will possibly put it up as a second system.
I had to also buy a new power for the computer, as it needed more wattage and I wanted the system to be stable. I also lowered the BIOS settings to have an even more stable system and it is still fast enough for my purposes.
Hard Disk and GFX board are still the same, and optical drives as well. This new Main Board has more SATA ports, lots of USB (10 at back of the case, 8 on board and I added 2), but no 1394 and no visible RS232C and Parallel. It has them on board but I need to put sockets there myself. Better than nothing though, as most other Main Boards lack RS232 and Parallel these days.
The funniest part was that although installing new Main Board drivers was very easy, there was no sound. It took me three days (nights to be correct), until I found a solution, and the main reason was that Microsoft has been forgotten to include the UAA Microbus drivers for HD Audio in its WinXP SP3!!!
Well, some good guy had a page to share his info to resolve this. Overall idea is to edit the registry so stupid Windows XP thinks it is SP2, installs the driver, and you again tell it that it is SP3!!!
Very idiotic I believe. I have never seen an OS so stupid
The other problem was with my Linux Mint. Although I have not changed my Hard Disks, it can not find its /dev/sda5 partition to boot, although it is there. I guess as main board is changed and probably I have changed the SATA ports for each of 2 hard disks, the UUID of partitions are changed.
I am working to resolve this one too, still no success.
and I have turned 39 this last 4th April and happy spring to all of you.
Paymaan.
