Apparently computers get old and grumpy too…
The Factory Case, which I'm using as my home computer even though it's got a wide assortment of little electronic squeaks and squeals (I've decided that it's impossible to make a PC completely quiet, because once you get rid of the fans you realize that all of the circuitry in the silly machine has its own little annoying sound. I might be able to quiet the machine down if I potted the entire thing in epoxy, but that would make it a little bit more difficult to maintain), has developed a fun startup routine.
I run Windows 2000 on the box, and over the past couple of weeks the startup routine is that I turn the machine on, it boots, waits a minute, and then either bluescreens or silently reboots. After that it's fine; it runs happily as long as I need it to without fuss, muss, or bother. Either (a) there's some marginal component or connection in the case that requires some amount of heating up before it works properly, or (b) I made a horrible mistake when I forgot to put in a spout so I could give it a cup of tea when I wake it up.
It's possible that it's just Windows 2000 being stupid -- Microsoft is pretty good at making operating systems that have the stupid switch flipped on, then welded into place. If that's the case, it's time for me to drag Mastodon up into the 21st century by putting in a kernel that supports hardware that's been developed in this millenium (though, judging from some of the hardware that's been developed in this millenium -- Adaptec, I'm looking at *you* here -- I'm not sure if that's really such a grand plan.) Or I could just buy a teeny tiny powermac, gut it, and use the parts for a complete organ transplant in the existing case.
I'll probably just start with putting Linux on the box. There are a couple of really bizarre problems with cut and paste from putty on Unix, but when you're running X and have loaded you system up with good truetype fonts (courtesy of Microsoft and Bitstream), PhoenixThunderskunk has better fonts that you can find with Windows, even if blackbox doesn't give you quite everything that Windows does.