You know, building a new computer isn’t always what it is cracked up to be. Sure, you can save a few hundred to a thousand dollars doing it yourself – but what happens when the silicon poo-poo plater you just assembled craps it BIOS all over your keyboard? You get left holding the plastic bag, asking why do I have to clean it up.
I just bought (what I thought) to be my newest installment of a good, fast and reliable machine – and it turns out the motherboard is a POS of galactic proportions. The Asus A8S-X motherboard is a big hunk of junk. The SIS chipset is unreliable, poorly configured and not very compatible in general. There are several dozens reviews that I should have confirming this. It’s 60 bucks for a reason.
The rest of the components are hopefully fine. Asus is a big name and I have had several Asus moBos in the past, and the have all been great – so I bought a new Asus board – A8N-SLI, and it is very highly rated and comes well recommended – and it should. It costs 3 times more – at $160.00 – well that is from Tiger – it’s a brain-staggering $240 at CompUSA.
The moral of the story is do more research ahead of time before you buy your own components.
Once completed, my machine will be a 64bit, AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400, with 2gb of RAM, and an nVidia 7600gs with 512 mg of vRAM. w00t! w00t! I bought a new SATA drive as well, so my boot drive will be SATA, and the secondary drive too. The sucky part is reinstalling Win XP and Ubuntu too – I had just gotten Ubuntu to 75% of where I wanted.
At least I still have my new recliner and this lappy.
HaHa! Computers suck ass!! Allow or dis-allow? Just think you could ‘ve upgraded to Vista at the same time, anf then it would all be FUBAR… Allow or dis-allow?
yeah, no making light of my sitch.
the 2nd day air option is a farce too, order Thursday, get it Monday. WTF?
Hopefully it wasn’t my BIOS suggestion that caused the disaster. 🙂
Nope. I did that hoping it would fix things. Which it did not. I hate windows too. The repair HOSED the installation, so I also ordered a replacement disc for XP – so I will have the latest updates on the install disc now. No more problems for me.
I can’t resist commenting that I sure had a nice smooth transition when I got my new MacBook Pro. Yes I paid more, but everything went quick and easy. I figure my scarce free time is worth something. And if I ever have the need for some abuse, I can run Windows on it.