With my LIMITED pc surgery experience I'm kinda intimidated at the thought of
plugging in borrowed power supplies, gulp

My own PC has a ATX 250 watt and the problem PC has a ATX 350 watt.
Seriously can I do harm by just plugging my working PC power supply into the
other one?
I only have the two PC's here and whilst I have a few spare HDD's and some other
stuff spare power supplies I don't got (never changed one either)
By the way my last test was to try to install XUBUNTU 7.10 over the top of
Ubuntu 5.04 and the same result as with Ubuntu 7.10, the monitor went to
coloured snow 15 seconds into the install.