my motherboard shorted out

Well, if alse fails rely on Metasploit and company. Learn to use the major tools if you're interested in them, maybe buy a book on something like the CEH v9 certificate and just go from there. Sure it's a week, but if you're tech savvy and you like cyber-security it could just be a kickstart.
Oh, learn the actual theory. Huge recommendation to not just blindly follow commands for specific situations as you won't learn anything in that case. We already have enough computers.