you'll be lucky to get a straight replacement - and it also begs the question why? when this one has failed you and it looks like it is a design fault

I believe novatech are selling asus socket 478's for about £40 which also support sata and a possible 4gb of memory - a much better proposition

Gateway bought eMachines about a year, year and a half ago. You may be able to buy a replacement MB from them, other wise you are out of luck and would have to buy a replacement 3rd party MB.

As far as lights flashing with the HDD activity light, unplug the HDD from the MB and from the PSU and see if the computer will boot. This will isolate the PSU or MB as to the faulty component. A bad PSU will kill a MB just as fast as a bad power circuit on the MB.

if I cant get a direct replacement that'll mean, a reinstall of XP and I only have recovery disks which I bet only support this motherboard

I found this thread to day,

I have over the last few years had to open up several e-machines, they are not that badly built and they used several brands of M/Bs, the Trigem IMHO being the worst of the bunch.

Asrock, MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, Foxconn 478 socket M/Bs are available from places such as Novatech, E-buyer, Savastore and so on from around £30 to £60 pounds.

Not often but sometimes I have to open up and repair a non-standard PSU because it has fried a motherboard and there's no choice.

In my experience when a M/B has to be replaced due to a fault on other peoples machines and to the best of their knowledge there have been no obvious power spikes I suspect and change their PSU as a matter of coarse, I sleep easier and I get very few comebacks.

As for OEM windows and recovery disks they are a pain in the arse, yes Efreddy your right you may have a problem, however there are more & more cases being reported where through no fault of the owners, Microsoft are being sympathetic when it comes to M/B replacements and reloading the OEM OS, you could give them a call, repair your PC first tho'.
Johanus