Puck’s Blog

My computer’s motherboard died on me yesterday. The computer could power up, but wouldn’t post or give me any error beeps. I removed everything and tried to at least see if it’d try to post alone and give me errors but got nothing.

It’s covered under Asus’ 3 year warranty, but getting a replacement now that it’s past the one year that NCIX will handle means shipping the broken board to Asus in the states, waiting for them to try to fix it, and then waiting for it to be shipped back via FedEx Ground. As it’s my work machine I simply can’t be without it that long.

So I ordered a new one from NCIX. They didn’t have my exact model any more, so I got the Asus A7N8X-X (mine was an A7N8X) which you’d think would be slightly better what with all the USB ports being 2.0 where mine had a mix of 1.1 and 2.0. Except once it got here (next day deliver! Nice!) and I was ready to install I realized that it wasn’t only lacking the 5.1 sound (not a huge deal) but it also didn’t have SATA connections for my two SATA drives. That means that my work data is *still* inaccessible even if I were to hook this up with a new hard drive. Bah!

So I’ve ordered the proper new mobo (A7N8X-E Deluxe) which should be here tomorrow and has the bells and whistles I need (and the ones I just want) and should also work fine without me having to do a full Windows reinstall (hope, hope, hope) and I can get back to work.

Now, I can probably return the totally-unused A7N8X-X motherboard, but that’d involve me driving in to Burnaby and losing at least 15% restocking fee on it. Instead, I’ll offer it here to anyone local that I know that would like a good, new, cheap motherboard. It’s Socket A, so you can buy yourself an AMD chip of some type (2800+ is about $133) and some memory and you’ve got a nice cheap upgrade for an aging system. Anyone? Anyone?