Whew!!! I think....

As most of you who read .geeks know, I've been having weird problems
with my PC for a long time. Today I had to go to the danger zone (it
wouldn't boot) and kill the CMOS. After an hour of booting and rebooting
with different BIOS settings and several CMOS wipeouts I finally got it
running again (something is missing from my LS120 floppy recovery disk
so it wouldn't boot from that). I downloaded updates from MSI for the
BIOS and drivers, haven't shut down the computer yet because I'm in
desperate need of a backup and I'm afraid to shut it down without doing
a full back first. Guess what turned out to be the smoking gun? The
frigging MoBo battery was dead! (when I finally got to the setup screen
after unplugging the PC it came back with a date of Jan 2, 2002). I
think that's been the problem all along, it was about 5 years old. Doh!
Crossing fingers that I'm ok now, I'm not going to turn off the machine
until I save everything to the external HD.

Oh, and I discovered that the power supply was the source of the noisy
fan, it's running nice and quiet with the lid off the case. I cleaned
many dust bunnies from inside the case, but the PS blades look like they
have been hitting something hard, it has disfigured blades. For the life
of me I can't figger out what the blades were hitting, but several hard
slams on the top of the case always made the noise stop.