Update on the beast: After 2 hours of drooling over my machine, I discovered the problem behind the whole thing. Nick, the coolest guy in my computer class (next to me of course) told me to hook up a system speaker in my machine -- you know, the little thing in your case that goes *BEEP* when you power up the machine that you cant turn off (without unplugging it). That is a nice way to diagnose a problem if you cant get a POST. Also he want to try this to see if maybe the motherboard was bad, so if I power it up and I dont get any beeps, it means the board has been jewed. I cross my fingers and hit the power button. As the system gains power, I look down and see my processor fan is going crazy. Its trying to spin, but it never builds any RPMs. I freak out now. I make all kinds of crazy assumptions, and I think my processor is bad now. Mr. DeVault, the teacher tells my it looks like the power supply isnt supplying enough power to the rest of the board. I remove all the hardware, except for the CPU. I look to my right, and I notice my friends mobo/processor has (finally) fried. I steal his power supply for the day, and hook everything up. I power it up and all the sudden I hear a bunch of beeps. HAH! Im finally getting power. I frantically reconnect my video card and ram, and the monitor finally powers up, giving me a post. Im jumping for joy over here. My processor is only being detected as a 750 Athlon, and it should say 1300 Duron. Im losing about half my speed. But, like I said, I needed to flash the BIOS for it to fully see my processor. I spend about 2 minutes getting the bios flash for my motherboard, it flashes the chip, and I restart. Now guess what it says -- yup, thats right, 1300 Duron. Fucking sweet. Now all I have to do is buy a better video card and a stick of more ram. When I finally get the machine going, my next post will be from there.