I woke up my Windoze workstation today to search some email in thunderbird. I soon smelled that ozone-y smell that smells like an electrical fire. The machine shut down shortly after (probably a thermal failsafe or short-circuit protection mechanism). I opened the case and tried to boot it again and saw some smoke vapors. There appears to be some kind of short on the mobo that results in a (REALLY) hot spot on the mobo -- like it literally turns red with heat. Given the melted-looking circuit on the mobo and this behavior, I'm pretty sure the motherboard (an ASUS P6X58D premium) is toast.

This brings me to my question. I think all the other hardware is totally fine -- hard drives and everything. Should I just buy a used replacment for the original motherboard for about $200 or should I upgrade to a more up-to-date socket like LGA 1150/1155/2011?

If I just buy another mobo identical to the old one, I'm thinking (perhaps wrongly) that the machine might just boot up without me having to reinstall OS, etc. This would be super nice because then I can export my email properly to a backup drive rather than trying to reinstall Thunderbird on a fresh OS and find some way to import the email from the old hard drive's data file.

If I buy a new, different motherboard and CPU (about $600), could I still just boot up the machine or will the OS installed on the SATA drive have trouble speaking to the new motherboard? I'm wondering how windows will behave if it boots up and finds that the hard drive is running on a different mobo/cpu combination.

Any input would be much appreciated.

If you're only interested in getting your thunderbird email off the hdd, then you need only connect the hdd to another system and look for the thunderbird mail boxes which are all ascii. In linux all mailboxes are under the following directory :-

/home/username/.thunderbird/?????.default/Mail

Hope this helps.