John,

Have you got the RAM sitting in the correct 0 slot, they are usually, Slots 0,1,2,3 in that order and you need to place them in that order.

Remember the little wire connections I mentioned about that were in the picture on the bottom, the coloured ones, White, Red, Green and White, Black and Red etc. You need to ensure they are correctly place on the pins at the bottom of the motherboard, behind what looks like the floppy disk control cable, not sure as it is covering the motherboard towards the bottom.

Check the jumpers on the Motherboard are all sitting in the correct spot.

If you have an old ISA monitor card, put that in one of the ISA slots and see if you can get it to boot to CMOS. Often one of the reasons a motherboard won't boot properly, they have incorrect settings on the BIOS and that can stop the motherboard from booting up. Just in case this is the problem, if you use the jumper that you can short out the CMOS with, remove the battery, leave it out for 10 mins and then put it back in, change the jumper and try again.

Also, if you have the cable incorrectly connected on the Floppy drive, in other words, not pin 1 to pin 1, and the same with hard drives, that can cause the motherboard not to boot up as well.

Remember on the cables one of the pin lines has another colour on it, like if it was red, it would have one that is black. With Black, I think it would likely have one that is blue or white, looking at the cables I can see on the motherboard, it looks likely to be correct, so check that they are correctly connected to the floppy and hard drive.

Bottom line, also the cpu could be an issue as well, so don't count that out as well.

I will try and see if I can find info on the motherboard in the mean time as well.

If in doubt, take the connections off, just connect the power, with the power switch cables connected, usually the white and green ones, and the little speaker connection, which is usually 5 pin connections with black and red on either end, and turn the computer on, it should boot, as you saw with the LED, and give you some sounds which if you count actually tell you some info in the troublshooting of the book if you got one.

I am suspicious about the card blowing, that to me isn't a good sign as well, usually happens from incorrectly connecting to the motherboard.

Keep at it.