Motherboard Resurrection

One way to learn how dependent you are on computers is to have your PC break down. Perhaps its my fault; every couple of months I open the case and q-tip the dog hair and dust off the fans and just try to generally clean the rest of the case out. Its an unavoidable condition carried in the Maier genes.
After going through these motions last week, I hooked everything back up, powered on and got- nothing. No scary blue screen, no error message, no input signal to the monitor. As our former roommate/tech geek was out of town at the moment, I went directly to my neighbor who is an electrical engineer of sorts. After an hour or so of, well, running through logic trees, we ruled out anyhting mechanical or any of the main hardware components. His final guess was a kapot video card and we tried a replacement the next night. If you don't want to spend a bundle on bringing the thing into a shop, it is invaluable to have a neighbor with a bunch of spare computer parts. With no result there, we began to get hopeless and I considered the options for getting a new system. We've learned that this is a typical cultural difference at least here- to an American, when baby wanty, baby wanty NOW (we are pretty comfortable with this); in this case the cheap, Dutch patience of Ronald prevailed and as he read through the motherboard manual online (you always have to have another computer to fix the first one) we spotted a few other little things we could try. For the geeks- we reset the CROM, making sure to use a wired keyboard when atempting to boot and everything came back to life. Now computer worky. Thanks Ronald.