Day Four. Jon's suspicions are confirmed, after a week of struggling, we learned the thing did not have a Plug&Pray BIOS. Sit down, think back. Last time the mother board was upgraded was a couple months before Win95 came out.
Jon did the detective work, got the phone number and called the mother board manufacturer. We got a new flashrom BIOS from the motherboard manufacturer about four days later. It didn't work. Another lesson learned: Computer gurus told us, "Oh, yeah..well..matching BIOSes to motherboards are always a 50-50 chance".
Then, when pressing on the onboard HD connectors to make sure the cables were tight, Jon noticed the machine reboot. And it kept rebooting everytime he touched the connectors. Jon said, "Aha". Which, being an inventor, he often says.
BREAKING NEWS:
Dateline: Issaquah, Wash., AP, 07-11
-- Frustrated with his personal computer a man pulled a gun
and shot it. The unidentified man put four bullet holes in the
hard drive and one through the monitor. One of the bullets
went through a wall and ended up in a neighbor's unit. Police
evacuated the townhouse complex and convinced the
43-year-old man to come out. "We don't know if (the computer)
wouldn't boot up or what," Sgt. Keith Moon said. The man was
taken to a hospital for a mental evaluation.
Any of you who have been through something like this know full well that man does not need a psychological evaluation, he needs a new computer!
Additional solutions may be found at The Illustrated Guide To Breaking Your Computer.
When Jon found out the problem was the BIOS and had ordered it, he also called his brother, Steve, who told him, "If it doesn't work, call me." He knew.
BIOS came, didn't work, we called the Wizard. You might as well know 
right now, the Wizard is Jon's brother, Steve, who owns Raven Computer with Jim. This is Steve:
He was the one who told us the new BIOS we'd ordered might not work. As soon as he heard of our problem, he knew the solution. Before we discovered the BIOS was the problem, Jon called several major manufacturers. We wasted no real time talking to Steve, we'd just made the mistake or ordering the BIOS before we did. Steve put in a new MMX Triton motherboard in a matter of minutes, booted up the machine and, since that moment, this thing has been flying!
Now that we see it run, we realize the machine never ran like a Pentium since we installed Windows 95. The board was just a few months older than Win 95 and didn't have the right BIOS then.
Here's a free hard earned clue: If you are planning a significant upgrade, take a good look at your computer's guts. If you do not have a flash upgradeable BIOS and you want to do this kind of upgrading, STOP RIGHT THERE, and think hard about upgrading your motherboard. One that has little W95 stickers on the chips!
After these last few weeks it seems like this computer and I have seriously abused each other. Not only that, it dragged a few people in along the way. This ride was wilder than anything I've been on at Disney World but then, they don't have the
Day Four. Jon's suspicions are confirmed, after a week of struggling, we learned the thing did not have a Plug&Pray BIOS. Sit down, think back. Last time the mother board was upgraded was a couple months before Win95 came out.