Mark,
Return a $20 motherboard to the manufacturer for a replacement? Why bother? It would cost another $20 to ship it!
This motherboard worked flawlessly for the client for several years before he chose to upgrade the system on which it was based. I know about the Intel 820 chipset saga (or whatever it was), and in my view it was more a theoretical/abstract problem than a real problem.
I could build this board into a refurbished system (no doubt, I will) and the result would be a system that also works beautifully for its new owner. Criticizing this board is like saying Cameron Diaz has an ugly pimple on her butt. It's an extreme micro view that ignores the macro reality. It's not important.
I had a customer who complained about one of these systems and we almost came to blows over it. He was so obsessed with the problems this board was supposed to present that the fact that the board did NOT give him any problems simply didn't concern him! He was convinced it was a stinker. As I recall, they only gave trouble in a very small number of cases. Like, you'd have a greater chance of getting struck by lightning or catching bubonic plague than you would of actually having trouble with this board.
Modern media sucks and that includes the computer media. Most idiot-geeks have a secret hatred of Intel (and Microsoft, and other industry "winners"), and any journalist who amplifies and intensifies a small engineering problem into a major "scandal" is going to write a very popular story, a story that sells. Pick on Intel, and all the AMD weenies will cheer you. Bash Microsoft, and all the Macintosh Boneheads will get a thrilling sense of self-affirmation. Bash Apple and Microsoft, and the Linux propeller-heads will come out of the woodwork and stage a Linux Torvalds Love-In.
But none of this has anything to do with real things here in the real world.
As evidenced by the years of happy, trouble-free computing this motherboard's previous owner has enjoyed.
SS
5:52:16 PM 
|
