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I upgraded my parents computer. I got the ECS - Sempron combo from Fry's for $65. The guy tried to sell me the more expensive boards for $60 more plus get me signed up for a store card. The Sempron 2400+ is itself worth the price, so that is what I was going for. Plus the older board will work fine. I also was assured that the motherboard was new. When I took it out of the box I discovered that the seal was broke and they just put a new seal over it. Stupid Fry's, they were supposed to fix that notorious problem. Well, I noticed that you have to set jumpers, but the manual said the board would autodetect, so I went with that. It did not. It said I had a 1000Mhz cpu, which is wrong, so I had to set the jumpers and it booted up at 1667Mhz, which is correct. I point out this mundane because many people no longer know how to set jumpers, or even read the manual for the matter. I am speculating, hoping actually, that that was the reason for the return. Also many people seem to have problems with ECS, but mine has lasted a year and a half. Well, everything is up an running and so far it looks good. I had to castrate my computer from 512MB DDR ram to 256MB PC133 for the other compter. A very much noticeable annoying slowdown takes place. I will stick in another 256MB stick to see if it helps. If not, I will have to buy some more DDR stuff. Please note that I am not mistaken. This motherboard actually takes both kinds. One thing I encountered was that my siblings think that the reason the computer failed is because I run non-Microsoft software. (this is the accusation, though not necessarily true.) It really bothers me the mindset of, "Everything by Microsoft is perfect, anything else is bad." This is exactly what Microsoft has desired and now I understand the big deal of bundling and such. Somehow they have convinced people that they must have IE, messenger, media player, outlook, and such. My point is that Microsoft is not the god of software. There is better software out there and it does not cause the system to fail anymore than Microsoft's. And it certainly does not cause hardware failures. I am not saying, "Do not use Microsoft." Use it if it suits your needs. If there is something better, use it. Do not be afraid of it. So now I need a case so I can have a linux box. Unfortunately, I may have finally fallen prey to MSI k7t pro2a faulty capacitor bug. It had the sliver colored ones which were supposed to be ok. I should have run Knoppix on it while I still had it set up to see if it was a hardware problem. I am pretty sure part of the problem was XP. When I went back after the crashes, it would say the memory had been dumped. This means the software was able to do something before complete failure. If the Motherboard is bad I will probably sell the two cpus that I have and wait for another Fry's deal. No sense in paying $40 for a 4 year old board. End. |