There's something oddly comforting about the idea of fixing things yourself. You save money, learn something new, and get that little rush of satisfaction when it all works. That is, until it doesn't.

I have a Dell Precision 410 Workstation that came with an Intel Pentium III 550 processor. I purchased a retail-boxed Intel Pentium III 1GHz processor as an upgrade. The old PIII 550 processor came ...