About 2 years ago I put together a PC for a mate, I used a simple water-cooling setup which has been flawless and silent for 2 years.

Then he bought a new graphics card and put it in, and bumped the watercooling, causing a slow leak onto the motherboard. It's a P5B-Deluxe with Wifi onboard.

I went and had a look, and after a good dry out it was working - but the wifi module was in the line-of-fire (or water to be precise) and didn't work.

Now he's getting a warning at boot-up "USB Overload!" and it shuts down. He's unplugged all USB devices, but no luck.

SO I'm going down there on Sunday. I'm considering just ordering a new motherboard and quiet air cooler, but the P5B is still freakin' expensive!

Is it worth taking a risk on a newer board? I'd have to do a full reinstall, wouldn't I?

grrr... this is all because of that blu-ray drive he bought. FFS.

I guess the question is - what motherboard should I get if spending £100?
And what air-cooler, for say less than £30?

I decided to get a better motherboard and put him on 4G of RAM. Will also put him on Vista I think. Windows 7 is not going to be stable enough for this weekend

P5B Del is still a good mobo, imho, hence why its still holding its price. If you buy an asus board (maynot even need to be Asus but hey they are pretty good so...) you might get lucky and be able to swap it out if you boot into safe mode and just uninstall the old drivers once you have the new mobo fitted??

I bought an MSI motherboard based on the P45, and somehow the Intel install utility for chipset drivers got it all working rather quickly.

Still, I told him to backup all his files because he may suddenly need to reinstall his OS.

Been running windows 7 for quite a while very stable and really liking it. But prob not a good choice as beta 1 runs out in august, so that would be you round on another weekend!

Usb overload may be refering to a power short on one of the usb ports maybe some water damage or a bent pin on usb header. Might be able to get some money for the board on ebay aswell.