About six years ago, I bought a massive Antec tower case with a power supply in it. It originally powered an Abit KT7-RAID mobo with a 1 GHz Athlon and five hard drives, until the Abit's RAID controller went bad - thereupon a Gigabyte 7N400 Pro2 replaced it, first with the 1 GHz Athlon, then with an Athlon XP 2600+.

This system eventually had most of the drives switched over to Samsung SATA units, and a sixth Seagate PATA drive to boot. I managed to wear out the PSU's cooling fan, and replaced it. Everything was going great until this morning. While I was recompiling PHP, I heard...