That series of mobos from Gigabyte was notorious for having problems. Had a friend working in a computer service and they have a high rate of returns for that. Meanwhile, Gigabyte ironed those problems and today's mobos are quite good. One thing that i like at them is the dual bios feature. Saved me a a few times when i was upgrading Bios and the power went down while updating. With the dual bios, the backup goes in and restores the original BIOS and you avoid the pain of going through service to restore BIOS ( if that's still possible ).

Asus mobos are very expensive, but definitely worth the money, so they are a good alternative.

And like i said: i know the mobo because i returned two of them in the warranty period.
You said that you had to shift the RAM from one slot to another, which indicates that the RAM slots might be affected as well. Probably the damage was more severe than you thought, back then. The RAM slots degrading was another common problem for those mobos.

Probably the best thing you could do it's to build a new PC from scratch. Peeps here can help you with that. It's pretty hard to find a mobo for your CPU in our days and most likely it's available only at second-hand market ( which for me is a no go, as i am not sure if everything is okay with what i'm buying - there are tons of things that you can do to present a component as functional, only to see later that dies on you ).

One thing i do know about that motherboard, is that the moron who designed the CPU heat-sink attachment mechanism was definitely on drugs!.... after their electro shock therapy and lobotomy operation!!

True!:D

In my book, that would be reason enough to toss this motherboard over and above the burnt out on board sound!

So they already changed things enough to stop my CPU going in a new board? Figures! do they still make CPU converters? Because by rights, with a new board and graphics, even with that old CPU the performance increase should keep me happy for quite some time.

I think they've stopped doing those around 2010. Intel has 3 sockets now: 1150, 1151, 2011 ( there was 1155 and 1156, but those were discontinued and 2011 is on his way out, too ) and AMD like 5 sockets, so it was probably quite hard to fit so many models.

Ok i got home about an hour ago and started this computer. It was loading up ok then the monitor suddenly went off as if i had turned off the computer!

So i opened the compuer, swapped the RAM around again, jiggled all the connections, closed it up, then it loaded up no problems at all!

I noticed the SATA connection to the HDD seems quite loose, but then again all these SATA connections seem quite loose compared to the old IDE (which may be out dated but at least they know how to plug securely!).

Relevant:
http://media.giphy.com/media/F7yLXA5fJ5sLC/giphy.gif

Not so much. When you own a computer for five years you can tell its moods, and its mood before i opened it up was well beyond the salvation of any simple restart.

It's still possible to find LGA775 motherboards. The two shops I use to buy from still list a MSI G41M and a pair of Asrock mBs
edit : question is : is it still worth it? Even if reasonably priced (70€ here) , it still leaves you with an end-of-life CPU.

He already has a quad core CPU, so not much room for improvement there. And 5 years for a PC, it's quite long. Should build a new PC based on his requirements ( if he plays new games, it should build around an i7, if he plays only old games, even an i3 would be fine ).

My best guess is that your Power Supply is starting to fail or you are asking it too much. BTW, you didn't list your PS model or size.

Anyway, without the full hexadecimal parameter of the BSOD, we can't tell what it means but it is usually driver related. Of course, a faulty hardware an cause that kind of BSOD, still the whole STOP code is required to be able to identify the driver in question.

If you get a blue screen do you see anything else? usually it gives out an error code of 0x000 etc.
Which usually describes the problem.

But my guess motherboard or graphic card.

I was simply providing a factual answer. If one has the budget, there is no reason to try to salvage a core 2 generation CPU. I was in the same position as the OP in September last year. Our second desktop ( in a large familly, that's the only option to avoid kids monopolizing the computer ) developped a motherboard failure. I opted for an amd solution though ( no need to have 2 i7's at home ), FX 6350 , Asrock Mb, memory. That was the best option for the budget and requirements I had, and it's much better for anything we use on it.

I'm going to now join the motherboard revolution. If you heard frying and popping and had to quit using the onboard sound, there is no telling the damage. You very well may not be getting proper voltages everywhere.

A couple months ago I had a problem where my computer started giving that burned plastic smell. Popped it open and the modem card was almost totally black (don't ask why it had a modem card. It's a Quad core supports 8 GB Ram, but somehow shipped with it). Thank God it wasn't my motherboard....