- Nov 13, 2000
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/rant on
Allright, I will explain it all to just get it off my chest. Since January I have been purchasing my dream system piece by piece. Well 2 weeks ago I finally got all the parts and set about building it. Here are the specs:
ABIT KT7A-RAID
512 MB pc133 crucial cas2 ram
(2) Maxtor Diamondmax 40 gb drives in a RAID-0 array
Soundblaster live value
Plextor 16X burner
Toshiba 16X dvdrom drive
3Com 3c905tx
Tornado Geforce2-Pro 64 mb ddr
and the usuals
Well I got it all put together and after a very frustrating round of battles with the damn FAN1 header not seeing that I plugged the damn CPU fan into FAN2 I got it booting.
Well I went to install win2k server and everytime I would make it to the detecting hardware part, *freeze*. Hard freeze too.
So I did this about 5 times to no avail, and I decided to try win2k professional. Same thing.
Then after about 3 days of researching ABIT problems, I flashed the bios to a beta bios from viahardware.com that allowed me to disable ACPI. I then installed Win2k professional without ACPI support and I thought I was out of the woods. Well Mr. Murphy had other plans for me.
So now instead of it freezing during installs, it just froze whenever it felt the need. It would run Prime95 all night, but if I were to actually use the damn thing, *freeze*.
So I delve deeper into the research and through here I found out about a possible bug in the Via hardware itself for all abit boards with 1AE0 and some other revision. Well I removed the heat sink and low and behold was 1AE0. So...I decide to try to get a replacement board.
On a side note here,
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD ANYONE HERE BUY FROM MICROBARN!!! YOU HAVE BEEN FOREWARNED!
I called them, and left a message cause no one would answer. I emailed them and no one replied. Basically I think they consist of a guy standing on a street corner with his thumb up his nose. I kept calling and calling, and in the meantime my new computer is unusable. I finally gave up on reaching them and am considering talking to the BBB.
So now I decide that I am going to give ABIT another chance, so I order ANOTHER KT7A-RAID from newegg. Another side note:
NEWEGG.COM IS THE BEST WEBSITE ON THE PLANET FOR PURCHASING COMPUTER PARTS, THEY HAVE EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE AND I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THEM.
Ok so now I get the new board, and I verified that I didn't have a flawed via chipset. (which I didn't) So instead of just swapping out boards (cause I wanted ACPI to work) I installed the new board and wiped everything to install win2k again.
Everything is running smoothly until I get to the format of the 80 gigs of space. It freezes hard at 74% ARRGGGHHHH!!!
I look at the highpoint drivers version from the old board and the new board and see that the old ones were 1.20 and the new ones were 1.30. So now I try to reinstall, but this time I use the 1.30 drivers.
Everything installed beautifully with ACPI...I got win2k up and running great and I thought I was home free. Alas, Mr. Murphy had not satisfied himself with my nether regions yet...so I tried to install Diablo2 and run it. Guess what...Yep...*freeze*
I am thinking "hey this could be a fluke" so I reboot and actually managed to get it installed. But of course nothing lasts, and now I am back to the random freezes. Albeit alot less frequent now, but still the damn thing shouldn't freeze. So far, since having the computer up since Sunday night it froze on me last night when I wasn't even using it. I just came in and nothing worked. Then again this afternoon after work I come in and it?s frozen again. I reboot, and it freezes after the reboot. As of this writing I have actually been up and running for 2 hours now without a freeze.
I am at my wits end...
My last resort was to call crucial and request some new 256mb modules that will be here Thursday.
If that doesn't fix it, I am selling the RAM and the motherboard and getting an AMD chipset with DDR ram.
/rant off
BTW, anyone want a barely used ABIT KT7A-RAID fairly cheap? Otherwise I am egaying it...surely someone else can't catch my gremlin.
Thanks for all your help this forum truly is a blessing to those of us that feel like abusing our computers.
-David
Allright, I will explain it all to just get it off my chest. Since January I have been purchasing my dream system piece by piece. Well 2 weeks ago I finally got all the parts and set about building it. Here are the specs:
ABIT KT7A-RAID
512 MB pc133 crucial cas2 ram
(2) Maxtor Diamondmax 40 gb drives in a RAID-0 array
Soundblaster live value
Plextor 16X burner
Toshiba 16X dvdrom drive
3Com 3c905tx
Tornado Geforce2-Pro 64 mb ddr
and the usuals
Well I got it all put together and after a very frustrating round of battles with the damn FAN1 header not seeing that I plugged the damn CPU fan into FAN2 I got it booting.
Well I went to install win2k server and everytime I would make it to the detecting hardware part, *freeze*. Hard freeze too.
So I did this about 5 times to no avail, and I decided to try win2k professional. Same thing.
Then after about 3 days of researching ABIT problems, I flashed the bios to a beta bios from viahardware.com that allowed me to disable ACPI. I then installed Win2k professional without ACPI support and I thought I was out of the woods. Well Mr. Murphy had other plans for me.
So now instead of it freezing during installs, it just froze whenever it felt the need. It would run Prime95 all night, but if I were to actually use the damn thing, *freeze*.
So I delve deeper into the research and through here I found out about a possible bug in the Via hardware itself for all abit boards with 1AE0 and some other revision. Well I removed the heat sink and low and behold was 1AE0. So...I decide to try to get a replacement board.
On a side note here,
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD ANYONE HERE BUY FROM MICROBARN!!! YOU HAVE BEEN FOREWARNED!
I called them, and left a message cause no one would answer. I emailed them and no one replied. Basically I think they consist of a guy standing on a street corner with his thumb up his nose. I kept calling and calling, and in the meantime my new computer is unusable. I finally gave up on reaching them and am considering talking to the BBB.
So now I decide that I am going to give ABIT another chance, so I order ANOTHER KT7A-RAID from newegg. Another side note:
NEWEGG.COM IS THE BEST WEBSITE ON THE PLANET FOR PURCHASING COMPUTER PARTS, THEY HAVE EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE AND I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THEM.
Ok so now I get the new board, and I verified that I didn't have a flawed via chipset. (which I didn't) So instead of just swapping out boards (cause I wanted ACPI to work) I installed the new board and wiped everything to install win2k again.
Everything is running smoothly until I get to the format of the 80 gigs of space. It freezes hard at 74% ARRGGGHHHH!!!
I look at the highpoint drivers version from the old board and the new board and see that the old ones were 1.20 and the new ones were 1.30. So now I try to reinstall, but this time I use the 1.30 drivers.
Everything installed beautifully with ACPI...I got win2k up and running great and I thought I was home free. Alas, Mr. Murphy had not satisfied himself with my nether regions yet...so I tried to install Diablo2 and run it. Guess what...Yep...*freeze*
I am thinking "hey this could be a fluke" so I reboot and actually managed to get it installed. But of course nothing lasts, and now I am back to the random freezes. Albeit alot less frequent now, but still the damn thing shouldn't freeze. So far, since having the computer up since Sunday night it froze on me last night when I wasn't even using it. I just came in and nothing worked. Then again this afternoon after work I come in and it?s frozen again. I reboot, and it freezes after the reboot. As of this writing I have actually been up and running for 2 hours now without a freeze.
I am at my wits end...
My last resort was to call crucial and request some new 256mb modules that will be here Thursday.
If that doesn't fix it, I am selling the RAM and the motherboard and getting an AMD chipset with DDR ram.
/rant off
BTW, anyone want a barely used ABIT KT7A-RAID fairly cheap? Otherwise I am egaying it...surely someone else can't catch my gremlin.
Thanks for all your help this forum truly is a blessing to those of us that feel like abusing our computers.
-David