Time for a new motherboard?

[fkchang]

Hi All:

I've had a number of errors plaguing me for a while and it finally struck me that I might have a bad motherboard. I have FIC AZ-11 for while, and noticed these things

- from the get go, I had stability problems, random crashes, certain applications having problems w/stability -- McAfee office causing many crashes, the Sims always crashing w/in 15 minutes. I seem to think this was a memory problem, so I got new memory. I ended up buying 3 pieces for 3 separate sources and both McAfee utilities and norton utilities reported that the memory had errors. I returned 2 of them and the replacements still reported errors -- so I suspected something on the mb.

- I have been totally unable to install a 2nd hard drive, no matter what combination of master slave, line select, (I think I've tried them all) will allow both to be recognized (actually neither will be recognized when both are in)

- I had crashes I tracked down to via chipset not doing usb too well, I solved those problems with a pci usb/firewire card -- what other problems are due to via chipsets?

- after my last attempt get 2 hd's working a few months ago, the disk activity light has been acting strange -- it's on most of the time. Very occasionally it acts normal and is on when I can hear the disk activity, but I haven't been able to determine the conditions when that happens.

- it seems that in tandem with the light misbehavior, I cannot reboot w/o powering down completely. If I do it w/o powering down, I'll get a time out and a "hard disk failure" message. Powering down and starting again works fine.

So based on these symptoms, I seem to think they all point to the same thing -- bad motherboard. IF so, I don't really want to do a upgrade, but I just want things to 1) stop crashing randomly 2) run 2 hard disks. I'm fine with the Thunderbird 850 and the 512 MB ram that I have, so I was thinking a comparable class mb that has a reputation of reliability say, Asus A7A266, A7V , Asus A7V133 Socket A ATX MBBs.

Opinions?

Thanks in advance

Forrest

 

[fkchang]

latest in the saga
Hi All:

So yesterday I got an ecs75sa/1.1 duron combo at Frys for cheap and put it in. I haven't had that much time to test it, but some of my problems have gone away, the hd led works correctly and I can run my 2 hard drives fine (I can't believe all the time I spent trying to get different configurations to work when it was my mobo all along), and I can soft reboot w/o problems.

I haven't had any time to test anything else, I see that my memory still reports errors from Norton (so I guess I did by 4 sticks of bad memory in 4 different instances), but my disks work and it's noticeably a bit snappier. I'm looking forward to trying out the DVD and video ins.

2 somewhat related questions. I put in entirely too much thermal grease (I couldn't get on the net since I had dismantled my computer, so I didn't get to see visual instructions til this morning) -- the pic and instructions said/showed put a bead of thermal grease on the CPU and it being late at nite and me w/o other resources I decided to err on the side of too much than too little. Will this be a problem. SHoud I remove the heat sink, clean off the chip and just put a bead on? If so, what should I clean it with. Also, my power LED conecter is 3 pin, and the ECS is 2 pin. I see the FIC board supported both, is there an adapter or should I just try to remove 1 wire and put it in the adjacent spot?

Thanks

Forrest