I've got a question about the innards of a computer. Well, not really a question, but I seem to have exhausted all my knowledge and am getting frustrated. I have a Pentium III 550 box that only had 64 megs RAM. It was bought almost 3 years ago and hasn't been upgraded at all. It is running Win98 and a conglomeration of other useless stuff as well. This machine hasn't been used for anything but internet, chat and e-mail capabilities. I just recently got a while hair up my butt and decided to put a little money into it because I am getting started in security and I wanna start playing around with some flavors of Unix. I went out and bought 256 megs of RAM...168-pin DIMM PC133 and a CD burner so I can back things up before I start fdisking. Now, I install the RAM and burner at the same time...stupid thing to do, but I did it. Always do one thing at a time, right? Well, I install and try to bring the machine back up and I don't get anything. I have power to the motherboard, as my NIC's activity light is reading traffic. Although, I don't know how it's doing that, because it doesn't even boot through the BIOS. I get no hardware beep, no POST beep. It just gets power to machine but doesn't do any loading. The harddisk spins, but can tell that nothing is loading. I get no signal at all on the monitor. I thought that maybe I might have burnt the RAM out, as I've seen that before just from not seeding it fully and trying to start up the machine. I don't smell any thing burnt, so I don't think that's it. And I can't imagine having burnt out a brand new stick AND the old one in one sitting. Just doesn't seem feasable. I have tried re-seeding the RAM....removing the RAM and putting the old stick back in, disconnected CD-RW, re-seeded every dogon peripheral in the god forsaken box, and even left it to sit there and think about what's it's doing wrong while I went and got drunk. I've talked nice to it, dirty, came close to kicking it once or twice and had several of my other coworkers take a look at it. It's almost as if just opening the case doomed me. I don't get it. I'm stumped, confused and frustrated. Anyone have any other types of hardware troubleshooting steps to try? Anything I have missed? Your help would be greatly appreciated.