newegg.com refunded my money today, leaving me free to shop for replacement parts for the new machine. This leads to the one advantage to this whole struggle, so far at least: the prices of computer parts are constantly dropping, such that for the same money I spent 3 weeks ago I can now get an identical motherboard from the same manufacturer but with ATA 133 support on board for the same price (the dead one only supported ATA100), and I can get the next AMD cpu up the scale or save $20, whichever I prefer.