(Copied from DA, so if you read it there, I didn't change anything... Except this explanation XD)
*happy dance* I FINALLY FIXED MY DESKTOP YESTERDAY! =D *happy sobs*
I hadn't planned on doing it, but this little voice in my mind was like "Hey... you should give it another shot..." It's been a few months since I left it alone when I wasn't getting any power at all, so I had a large break to cool down XD; Took everything out, added more support under the motherboard, carefully checked things were plugged all the way in, and turned it on after every new addition. Powered on well, though I didn't get video like it was before I swapped out the CPU fans.
Since I had a smaller fan in, I decided to try testing out my RAM to see if it booted with one stick. Discovered I did, in fact, have a bad RAM stick. I was only running on 8 GB of working RAM before so it made sense. So I pulled 3 2GB sticks out of my old desktop and put them in the remaining slots, so I have 14GB of working RAM =) *just realized she didn't check the speed of the old RAM* ... =O_O;= I'm sure it'll be fine...
The sad part is... the reason I wasn't getting video was due to my graphics card... After I put in my old one it booted right away with no problems... Even sadder, tho, was that the fan on the old GPU was rusted in place, so it did not have cooling. Fortunately, my brothers kept their old GPUs (which were better than my old one by a bit) so he let me have that one.
Now I have a working desktop =D This means I can not only play my more recent games again, but I can also (hopefully) do art faster because I will have less lag. I love my laptop, but it is getting on in years. It still works pretty darn well all things considered. I just can't play DAI on it =P Or use Rebelle without everything getting EXTREMELY sluggish.
I feel very happy I finally fixed it and also a bit in disbelief because it sat there so long, then my gut tells me, "We're fixing this now!" and I'm just like "Okay, sure buddy." XD
Now I can get back to doing art =)
