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Inexpensive Motherboard

S

Stephan28

Senior member
I'm looking for an inexpensive motherboard for a stable (no overclocking) system for my wifes computer which just died. It was a KT7 Raid. I will be using a Athlon 1200 chip and the exisiting memory (if I can)..... Just want something simple to set up that is rock stable. Would like to have on board audio, lan, and a nice bonus would be video but with an AGP slot which I will more than likely use. Thanks for your recommendations.
 
I would recommend this one

ECS N2U400 $42

It should work with your current componets, and would allow you to upgrade it with better ram or CPU

This would be a nice upgrade to put in there for her
XP2600+ 333HZ Barton Core $73

Just over $100 for the combo, and it would be over twice as fast as the old machine.

And what ever mobo you put in there you will most likely have to reformat the hard drive and reload windows. If she has data on the hard drive that she wants to keep, I would recommend pulling the HD and putting it in a working PC as a slave drive and save the data you want to disk, then reformat it and put it back in the rebuild.
 
That one will work. But its a micro atx, is the current machine a small form factor? If not it may be tricky mounting it in the case. I would check out the case and see if it has mounting holes on the backplate for micro atx. I'm not an ASRock fan, I think the ECS is a better motherboard.
 
MicroATX boards have the exact same mounting holes and measurements as fullsize ATX - they're just three slots shorter.
 
Originally posted by: Stephan28
I'm looking for an inexpensive motherboard for a stable (no overclocking) system for my wifes computer which just died. It was a KT7 Raid. I will be using a Athlon 1200 chip and the exisiting memory (if I can)..... Just want something simple to set up that is rock stable. Would like to have on board audio, lan, and a nice bonus would be video but with an AGP slot which I will more than likely use. Thanks for your recommendations.
Click to expand...


Newer board require DDR memory. I'm not sure it your board has it.

IMHO, If you have to get a new motherboard, new RAM..then why not a new CPU and get one step faster? a nice sempron socket 754 with a nforce3 motherboard will be just that .. rock stable and inexpensive and way faster than the old 1200.
 
THis is what happened with the computer. It had been crashing pretty regularly running Win98SE. Finally the hard drive gave up. I threw in a new hard drive and proceeded to load XP Pro....It gave me a little bit of a fuss loading it but it loaded. Then I realized that I had partitioned the entire drive as "C." I went back and repartitioned the hard drive and it kept saying that it couldn't find files on the XP CD. I tried and tried...different drives....different CD's etc....Finally I did a low level format and tried again....It got worse! I finally found out that if I ejected the CD and reinserted it when it couldn't find a file, eventually it would find it and I pressed on. Not just one file either....lots of them. One after another. I must of inserted the CD a hundred times or more in the end. The CD's don't have a scratch on them either! Once XP comes up it says it had a serious error and has recovered. It will work for some time and then it just up and says it has failed and has to reboot. To make matters worse I can't seem to be able to load anything else w/o it just plain shutting down on me in the middle of an install.

I'm trying to decide if I should just sh*t can the entire system and build another one... or what I should do.

Any thoughts?
 
My tech friend at the DOD says completely wipe the hard drive clean and start all over again. They use something called Datawipe. I am not sure if it is available for public use.

Just his 2c
 
Well, I used MaxBlast and had it write all zero's..... It took hours...I think that is about as good as I can do it? Not a format genius by any stretch of the imagination so educate me please.
 
Originally posted by: Stephan28
THis is what happened with the computer. It had been crashing pretty regularly running Win98SE. Finally the hard drive gave up. I threw in a new hard drive and proceeded to load XP Pro....It gave me a little bit of a fuss loading it but it loaded. Then I realized that I had partitioned the entire drive as "C." I went back and repartitioned the hard drive and it kept saying that it couldn't find files on the XP CD. I tried and tried...different drives....different CD's etc....Finally I did a low level format and tried again....It got worse! I finally found out that if I ejected the CD and reinserted it when it couldn't find a file, eventually it would find it and I pressed on. Not just one file either....lots of them. One after another. I must of inserted the CD a hundred times or more in the end. The CD's don't have a scratch on them either! Once XP comes up it says it had a serious error and has recovered. It will work for some time and then it just up and says it has failed and has to reboot. To make matters worse I can't seem to be able to load anything else w/o it just plain shutting down on me in the middle of an install.

I'm trying to decide if I should just sh*t can the entire system and build another one... or what I should do.

Any thoughts?
Click to expand...

Drop back ten and punt! Seriously, it could be something simple or a combination of simple things. Had something similar once and solved it with a combination of putting in a new CD drive, cable and BIOS settings. First things first, I'd put in a different CD drive although it sounds like you might have tried that. Do it with a different cable and MAKE SURE you check the jumper settings on the drive (Master, Slave, Cable select). Make sure you go through and unplug, then re-plug BOTH your IDE cables. Sounds silly but do it. Then go into the BIOS and do two things: set it to "Default Settings" and then make sure that the BIOS recognizes each drive (optical and HDD) in the correct configuration; meaning Master/Slave and IDE1/IDE2. If you do these, along with changing out the CD drive (take yours and put it on hers for this attempt) and for some reason it doesn't work, try flashing/re-flashing the BIOS.
The problem you're describing doesn't really fit the symptons of a bad MB, so stick with it and see if you can solve this.
 
Originally posted by: Buz2b

Drop back ten and punt! Seriously, it could be something simple or a combination of simple things. Had something similar once and solved it with a combination of putting in a new CD drive, cable and BIOS settings. First things first, I'd put in a different CD drive although it sounds like you might have tried that. Do it with a different cable and MAKE SURE you check the jumper settings on the drive (Master, Slave, Cable select). Make sure you go through and unplug, then re-plug BOTH your IDE cables. Sounds silly but do it. Then go into the BIOS and do two things: set it to "Default Settings" and then make sure that the BIOS recognizes each drive (optical and HDD) in the correct configuration; meaning Master/Slave and IDE1/IDE2. If you do these, along with changing out the CD drive (take yours and put it on hers for this attempt) and for some reason it doesn't work, try flashing/re-flashing the BIOS.
The problem you're describing doesn't really fit the symptons of a bad MB, so stick with it and see if you can solve this.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestions. I will definently take a look at it when I am home with some free time to spare. I know...the symptoms are very weird.

 
Originally posted by: Buz2b
Click to expand...

Drop back ten and punt! Seriously, it could be something simple or a combination of simple things. Had something similar once and solved it with a combination of putting in a new CD drive, cable and BIOS settings. First things first, I'd put in a different CD drive although it sounds like you might have tried that. Do it with a different cable and MAKE SURE you check the jumper settings on the drive (Master, Slave, Cable select). Make sure you go through and unplug, then re-plug BOTH your IDE cables. Sounds silly but do it. Then go into the BIOS and do two things: set it to "Default Settings" and then make sure that the BIOS recognizes each drive (optical and HDD) in the correct configuration; meaning Master/Slave and IDE1/IDE2. If you do these, along with changing out the CD drive (take yours and put it on hers for this attempt) and for some reason it doesn't work, try flashing/re-flashing the BIOS.
The problem you're describing doesn't really fit the symptons of a bad MB, so stick with it and see if you can solve this.[/quote]

Well, I think I may have found the problem thanks to your suggestions. I did a quick peek at the motherboard and found that the hard drive was hooked up to IDE2 and the CD-ROMS to IDE1. I happened to notice on the inital post that the hard drive was coming up as "secondary master" so I checked the cabling...... I swapped them around and at least now I can load some programs with out the computer just up a rebooting on me. I still think that I will reformat the drive again and do a fresh install of XP to be on the safe side.

I wonder if this is why the original computer with 98 SE was such a PITA as well. More than likely huh.... I figure the "prioritizing" of information was all screwed up on the ide busses because of this. Any thoughts?

 
Might be a good idea to reformat, as you mentioned. I'd run FDISK and partion it again also. If nothing else, it might eliminate any corruption that may have resulted with the earlier problems.
Also very important that you check the documentation on the HDD relating to jumper settings. If you've had it a while you might have to look on the mfg's website. Some drives have to be set for Cable Select (CS) if they are the only drive. There could be other considerations also.
 
Hopefully I'll get some time to reformat this weekend. The computer is having some minor issues so hopefully a fresh format and install will take care of it. Thanks again for your help.
 
Originally posted by: Stephan28
Hopefully I'll get some time to reformat this weekend. The computer is having some minor issues so hopefully a fresh format and install will take care of it. Thanks again for your help.
Click to expand...
Make sure and download the latest MB/chipset drivers, along with the same for the other hardware components. Good Luck!

 
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