Took my freshly re-cobbled together computer to local computer guy after an upgrade with hand-me-down parts. He asked what was wrong and I said there was an alarm for the CPU fan, and that I'd torn the case open and hooked a second fan into the CPU fan connection and it also didn't work, and the I plugged the CPU fan into a different connection and got it working, so by elimination I was pretty sure the fans were good and the connection in the motherboard was bad.

He seemed mildly amused/impressed by my spiel. I'm not really a computer person, but swapping out parts to narrow down the source of the problem seemed logically basic.

I ended up chilling with him while he worked on things. He found WinZip on my desktop and let out a "whoa retro." which hurt me deeply.