replacing a motherboard

[Seth Gordon]

Our Windows machine stopped working, and the guy at Micro Center was 
nice enough to tell us “your motherboard’s fried” without charging us 
seventy bucks for the diagnostic.  OK, I thought, I’ll just go out and 
get a new motherboard. How hard can that be?  Bwah-hah-hah.

The machine is an ASUS CM5571, and the motherboard is a P5QL-M-EPU.  I 
found the specs for the P5QL/EPU (no M) on newegg.com, but since that is 
an ATX keyboard and my machine’s motherboard is micro-ATX, I can’t trust 
that this accurately describes my machine.  I can’t find technical 
documentation for the P5QL-M-EPU itself online, and judging from some of 
the things I see in the Asus forums, I am not the only user who is 
frustrated by this lack of documentation.  My email to Asus tech support 
on Saturday night has not yet received a response.

The CPU is a Pentium E5400 / 2.7 GHz, the data bus is 800 MHz, and the 
memory is DDR3-1333 SDRAM.  Should I just look for any other micro-ATX 
motherboard compatible with those chips?  (The Asus P5G41C-M *looks* 
like it fits the bill.)  Will Windows give me grief once it boots up and 
discovers that it’s no longer running on the same motherboard as the OEM 
supplied?  What other frustrations do I have to look forward to?