I mounted a motherboard in a case and installed a CPU without frying it last night! It appears that the IDE controller in Diana’s old motherboard was indeed the problem; I formatted the hard drive and installed Win2K without any trouble. I won’t believe it’s really fixed until I’ve hooked it up to the Net and left it on for 24 hours, though.

Hmmm, maybe I will assemble my next Intel box from scratch, after all.

Right now, though, I’m looking long and hard at Macintosh. I’ve picked up a copy of Mac OS X Hacks, and it seems this OS is highly scriptable, more so than Linux. I’m gonna browse it more this weekend, and if it looks like I can do all the stuff I want, that’s where my tax refund is going.