Aaarrrgghhh!!

I have spent the entire afternoon putting my computer back together and trying to make it work.
And it doesn’t.

To recap: a year ago, I bought a new motherboard. This worked fine for a few weeks, then showed signs of failure. I took it back to the shop, who told me the fault was mine – I hadn’t attached the MB with offset screws, so that it had touched the case and started shorting.
So, I eventually bought another board. Put it in properly this time, and couldn’t get the keyboard or mouse to work – at all, not just in Windows, so the failure was obviously hardware.
So I sent it back and asked for a replacement, and got sent what was supposedly a new MB. This MB wasn’t sealed up, didn’t come with any screws, driver disc or data cables. And looked a whole lot like the board I’d sent. But I didn’t query it – too trusting, I guess.
By then, I’d put my hard drive onto B’s machine. He wasn’t using his machine much, so we drifted along like that for several months, with me promising to get my machine working sometime. I was highly reluctant to start it; my poor eyesight made installing the board each time lengthy and incredibly fiddly, with all those tiny jumpers and connectors (several of which don’t correspond to anything in the MB manual). Holding a magnifier while trying to read a manual and put a connector on the right way is not easy. And having two MBs fail on me in quick succession shook my self-confidence.
But, finally, I bit the bullet this afternoon and set about installing it. And couldn’t get the mouse to work. Any mouse, and I have both USB and serial mouses. So my suspicion that I got my faulty board back would appear to be correct.

Sigh. Looks like I’ll have to fork out for yet another new board (I’ve been procrastinating too long to send the faulty board back again). Until then, I’m back on B’s machine.
B*gg*r