Senusret

What do those different red ports do Also this is old I see PCI and lol DVI to VGA what

This is what I'm getting, along with this as a chair. Both have Prime and are from Amazon if you have that. Also, yes, the word 'sexy' is in the URL. Take what you will of that.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/cbsCK8 Imagine it in a brick-and-mortar shop. Old people and morons in their 40s are the customers. Has an SSD, 8GiB of RAM, and an i3. Shoot.

gay

As I said in the OP, the DVD drive is borked (it reads but really badly), and the BIOS doesn't recognize USB as a potential boot device.

Great, this doesn't help. How can I be sure I'm getting the right one, were I to buy a converter to SATA?

The floppy IDE slot on my board is 33-pin, and the CD/HDD IDEs are 43-pin. The IDE used by the laptop, SSD, and the cable that came with it are 44-pin and the pins are closer together than both the FDD and HDD kinds... what?

I didn't know about this until now. A client of mine has (at my advice for speed improvement) bought an SSD for their Acer Aspire 3620 and is having me install it. With the parts bought and situated, the DVD drive burnt out, and the BIOS blind to USB, I turned to my 90nm guinea pig motherboard for the imaging process – only to find that there are apparently two kinds of IDE/PATA, and that I've got the wrong one! For the laptop and the SSD it's the right connectors, but my desktop board is using a larger PATA interface that is apparently 43-pin and more spaced out physically. What are these two types of connectors, what's the rationale between them, and what should I search so as to find converters/adapters for the newer PATA? My 45nm guinea pig has SATA if a converter using that would be appropriate. Thanks.

Guys, guys, hold on. The OP may be a paranoid prepping doomsayer who needs the ultimate anti-NSA protection everywhere he goes. Or he could be a paranoid schizophrenic. Someone should check if he's using HTTPS everywhere or connects over Tor or some ludicrous thing like that