Just bad bag of that screws. Toss it and buy bag of decent screws. If find a peecee screw that is still chewing or "seizing up" touch bit of oil to the thread. Fixed for good. This happens because of poor lubing or nothing or low quality steel in production of those crappy fasteners. Those that makes shavings is because of cracks in the thread tips. Almost all screws, bolts are smashed on one end of cut rods to make heads slots, philips, hex, torx etc, rolled in thread dies to form threads. Very few uses true machined fasteners. Quality smooshed on heads and rolled fasteners are *stronger* because of compressed grain. Machining process cuts into this grain and introduces crack stress beause of too sharp corners. I know because machined fasteners were used frequently in clocks and watches. Yes I did break machined screws for any reason not just from over-tightening. Machined are very sharp corners, ground-look. Rolled and squished heads looks well that, smooth or dull and look at ends of these fasteners is convex. Actually not. IBM used mass-produced rolled screws of good quality and early machines did use mass-produced fasteners that were good quality. Yes, *can* still buy decent peecee cases made with rolled edges. Acer is one, Antec is another so on. Aluminum cases is making slow coming back. I know classic 'puters were made in large numbers with aluminum cases early days. Cheers, Wizard

On Mon, Apr 01, 2002 at 06:52:52PM -0500, Douglas H. Quebbeman wrote: First rule: don't purchase cheap crap. Yes, you can get a x86 computer real cheap - but you get what you pay for. Look around, aim for quality and be prepared to shell out slighly more cash and you still can get rather good hardware. ACK. Simple: market forces. Most customers want _really_ cheap stuff. After all the "fat" has been cut, the only way to reduce prices further is cutting back the quality. Most customers - looking only at the price tag are happy with this and don't understand why this is Bad (TM). Yet they still complain when (and if) the find out what crap they bought. There is an old japanese proverb: "I don't have enough money to purchase cheap things" - probably based on the fact that he who purchased cheap crap spends at least twice as much money - first for the cheap crap and then for some quality goods. You can get good cases for PC hardware - you just have to ask for the right manufacturer. I'm the happy owner of a Chieftec Miditower case and it's a pretty good one: _no_ sharp edges (all rounded out), comes pre-equipped for additional fans (just clip in the 80x80 cm fan), rail kits for the 5.25" drive bays ... very well thought out case. Rather heavy, even when empty - but it's a solid piece of work, not one of those flimsy, sharp-edged crap cases you get with the usual cheap deals. I found the price of a good, top-of-the-line X86 box to be decreasing only rather slowly over the years. It started for me with $3000 in 1994 and is now at approximately $2000. Yes, this is a SCSI-only system, normal, simple workstation configuration - nothing fancy (like special graphic cards for CAD), excluding the monitor (hand over another $1000). But I got 4 years of use out of my previous workstation machine (now doing duty as a systems testbed machine) - and the current one is intended to last quite some time too. Regards, Alex. -- We're gonna be body guards for teen rock-stars. Wouldn't the cause of freedom be better served if we killed them instead? -- Schlock from the ''Schlock Mercenary'' comic strip