My previous post, Don’t be cheap, I stated that when purchasing computer components that you shouldn’t be cheap. Well, I didn’t listen. I went to Tiger Direct today and purchased an MSI motherboard for $50 (USD) and a Pentium D 805 (dual-core 2.66GHz) for another $50. The reason for the motherboard is because I didn’t want to purchase anything else as I already have 1GB of DDR PC4300 memory and an old Radeon 9550 AGP card. This new setup is much faster than the previous.

Well, the bad motherboard I am going to RMA through Newegg.com which means I will get that same Biostar motherboard back. This time I will not flash the Bios at all, screw Biostar and their incapable tech support. That means I will have to 64bit systems. The new system will be my main 64bit system and I will use the old amd64 rig for my pbuilder box/server.

Thanks to those of you who offered similar situations and pointers. Now I will be able to finish my final projects for school. Ya, I have to install that great OS called Windows XP, which was free as in free beer because of the ASP.NET class. I tried out Mono and Mono Develop w/o any success. Now that I understand ASP.NET a little more, which I am not the biggest fan of at this time, I will mess around some more and see if I can reproduce the website projects that we had to do.

When buying new computer components. A couple of months back I had lost a long time favorite Abit motherboard with my XP processor. This caused me to go ahead and buy the cheapest AMD 64 setup I could at the time and actually got what I thought was a good deal. I had purchased a Biostar K8M80-M7A from Newegg.com with an AMD 64 3200+ for like $70. It has worked great until I had purchased a DVD burner that was SATA II. It works fine, however it works when it wanted to. Booting from CD was a crap shoot. If I was lucky, I would get it to boot from the CD 1 out of 5 tries, however the average was 1 out of 15. I had contacted Biostar about the issue since their websites, both Taiwan and USA, suck. I was trying to find information on the issue or maybe a Bios upgrade. Well low and behold you couldn’t download the correct Bios, and to this day you still can’t. So, I fired off an email to their USA tech support and within an hour I had a response with an attachment. Rock on I thought. Well tonight I figured I would go ahead and get the Bios flashed since I had just bought a brand new WD SATA II 250GB, 16MB cache, and 7200 RPM drive from Newegg for like $60 shipped. Another great deal. Well, I go and buy a floppy drive so I can do the flash. Ya, who the hell uses floppy drives still? Anyways, it flashes fine, says it worked and then it asks me if I want to reset the system, so I press ‘Y’, and it reboots. D’OH! It doesn’t reboot, black screen, no beep. So I wait a few seconds thinking maybe it is resetting itself. Who knows with hardware these days. Well, after about a minute and nothing. I decide OK, reset the Bios. So I reset it accordingly, get the PC back in order, and press the power button. No luck, same exact thing.

So, I have emailed Biostar letting them know about the issue. I am pissed beyond belief right now. HOLY SMOKES! I just realized, I have homework to do, and the only machine where I reluctantly spared 10GB for that crappy OS, is now dead. Just my luck. So let this be a warning to you. When it comes time to purchase a major system component, don’t skimp. There is a good possibility it will bite you in the ass. And to think, I should have learned my lesson. This is my 3rd Biostar to belly up in less than 6 months. Thanks Biostar!