Recent content by Ronzon

Our shop has built well over 40 systems with this board. Sold many to individual system builders. Only ONE has come back because he was trying to use a 250w ATX power supply. Incidentally I myself have the K7S5A (early revision) in my home system and it had the disappearing CMOS at startup...

No need for a low level format. Boot up with a Win98/ME startup disk and do a "fdisk/mbr". This overwrites the master boot record with a fresh copy (clearing any damage from boot sector viruses). Format normally and you will be fine.

FYI, TTGI actually makes excellent power supplies. Heavy, solid design at affordable prices. I have used Antec, Allied, Leadman, Macron, Enlight, Delta and the TTGI is right up with the best. Specs are good, appears to be very similar to Enermax supplies. However the triple BB fan design is...

Great price on a Motorola FRS radio. Discontinued at Staples, but available at many stores (ringing up at $39.99, B&M will pricematch to Staples.com at $28.50) Motorola T6220 Motorola $15 rebate, ends 6/30/02 Rebate Picked up two at the Moscow ID location. If you can use coupons, you can...

Boot up with the WinXP disk and choose repair, BUT not the recovery console method (at the first prompt, do not choose to repair using the recovery method -- let XP look for an existing windows installation and then choose to repair that installation). Should migrate just fine and keep all her...

Try going into the bios and turn off the auto detect for the drive -- select NONE or NOT INSTALLED instead. With the bios showing no drive, it is solely up to Windows to determine the type of drive and UDMA capability. This has solved many UDMA probs in Win2k/XP computers. Hope this helps...

NAV 2002 is very thorough, but seems to have heavy overhead (system slows quite a bit). Does the free AVG antivirus slow down the system much? If so, I may just try it!

Win2k Pro install always seemed a bit sluggish, especially with a few progs open (e.g. IE, Media Player, OE -- simple stuff). Processor is fast (XP1700+ on an ECS K7S5A) and IDE Raid (2 Maxtor 40g in Raid 0) keeps the HD humming, but the whole system has seemed just a tad slow. Just added...

This great CDRW is back in stock at Newegg as of tonight. Seems to be a shortage of Lite-On 24X CDRWs all over. Excellent, versatile drive for the price (if you can live with the black faceplate color!). Newegg Lite-On CDRW

Try replacing your Ethernet cable that connects to the computer.

Good board when working, but frustrating. Just when you think you have a stable, functioning system, something goes awry. In my second K7S5A system, the CMOS settings are lost regularly on a very cold (ie powered off overnight) boot. Nothing changed, just decided to do it on its own. Changed...

Had a perfectly working K7S5A for two months, then added more DDR memory. Installed the memory while the board was in the case. As usual, it took quite a bit of effort to seat the DIMM in the slot. The board booted, but hung at the initial post screen. No way to go into setup -- appears...

Highpoint 370 (Abit HotRod 100) raid works just fine in the K7s5a -- have it in Slot 1 sharing with AGP -- no problems at all.

To restore the WSOCK32.DLL file (which gets changed by viruses, trojans and chat programs) in Windows ME: 1. Clean boot into DOS using a WinME startup disk with CDROM support. 2. Place Windows ME CDROM in drive. 3. Type in the following command from the A:> prompt: extract/a...

Sorry...sold out locally. These things went fast!