As I said yesterday, I was going to be working on some low end cards, one of which is an AGP part. That required me to dig out my ABIT AV8 3rd Eye motherboard - the motherboard that I had used for most of the AGP video card reviews on bit-tech. I’d spent a long time getting an operating system installed, without video card drivers, with a wide selection of games to use for video card evalutations.

I’d gone so far as to make a ghost of the partition too, to enable me to return back to a fresh install after every review without three or four hours of installing game after game. Now, I’d not touched the system at all, it was stable, and had a clutter free operating system the last time I used it.

This morning was a totally different story all together. I install everything, as normal and fired the board up… CPU Fan spins… nothing else… No Display, no post, great! Go Tim!!

I change the video card for something else, a little older - an All-In Wonder 9800 Pro, it POSTs!… Superb! That is, superb until I got close to booting Windows. It resets before the Windows boot screen appears, so I go through the BIOS and check it for the usual problem areas, nothing there. So I reset the CMOS - still no better! Then, out of the blue, it decides to tell me that the partition is corrupt with /Windows/System32/ being corrupt. After 90 minutes of trouble shooting, the fucker decides to tell me that it’d be funny if the hard drive corrupt itself. By this time, I can’t even get the system stable in Safe Mode!

I then load fail safe defaults, and go about cleaning up the mess with an OS repair. It’d be good if I could do that without the motherboard blue screening during Windows setup though…

That’s it, throw that board out and get something that works.

Thankfully I have a reasonable supply of spares, just in case something like this happens. That isn’t the point though, the majority of consumers don’t have a vast array of spare motherboards that work with their current CPU and thus, can’t find out what is broken, or even find a ‘quick fix’ for the issues that they have. I guess I speak for the majority of consumers who buy a product and expect it to work when you plug it in. We can live in hope, though… ;)