"On The Other Claw...."

Once, a long time ago, Morgan's Win2K box was acting flaky. We installed Redhat 7.2. It worked OK for a bit, having a more robust kernel than Windows, and then it crapped out. So I did something I should have done in the first place, opened the case. I noted that the capacitors that filter the processor's power had "boiled over." 1 New Mombo later, and Linux and Windows were running fine in a dual boot configuration, and continued to do so until the HDD died a few years later.

The thing this taught me is that OS's are so complex and fussy that it is so often tempting to troubleshoot them first, but sudden failures, or intractable issues often call for a physical inspection first, as a sort of short-circuit evaluation of the situation.