::edit::for politeness : hi all im new here
ok, what i did was i tried to open up my shuttle, take the old geforce 4 mx 64mb out, pop a geforce 6600 in, (in a room full of carpetting and i didnt touch anything metallic and grounded before that but hopefully it isnt the cause) , and the next thing i know is the floppy drive light stays on, and the system wont boot, no signal coming out of the video card... restarted the computer, still no signal coming out of the video card, but the floppy drive seems to be behaving normally now

i took the 6600 out, put the old geforce 4 mx in, and it still wont give any video output , uh oh.... reset the cmos, and well, it boots, but at the post screen it says my cpu (amd athlon xp 3200) is running at 1300mhz, and something about running in safe mode and a cmos checksum error and that i should go into the bios and set the correct cpu and ram speeds...

well, when i go into the bios , and every time i press 'save and exit setup' , no matter if i set the cpu to run at 100mhz fsb x 8 to whatever random value i put in, it would just not boot... like when i press 'save and exit setup' it the video card would just stop giving output, and the only thing i could do was open the case again and reset the cmos jumper again, just to be able to go into the bios again, and 'save and exit setup' into the machine not booting yet again...

i swapped the cpu, i bought a brand new atx '580w' psu, i swapped the ram, nothing helps... so far the only conclusive thing is that when i put the 6600 in, it wont boot even after i reset the cmos, whereas the geforce 4 mx would at least show the post screen with the error when i switch the computer on after resetting the cmos...