ubrayj02's Journal: EliteGroup's K7S5A Motherboard

Anybody who has ever dealt with a broken system that they are fiscally unable to trouble-shoot knows how I feel right now.

I've seen too many poor typists and noobs post their illogical screeds against some piece of hardware to start complaining about my current problems. However, as a devout garage-mechanic style computer user, I feel let down by my abilities and buying decisions this time around the upgrade loop.

I bought a motherboard that doesn't seem to work. The problem is that I am not sure if it is the new motherboard, the new CPU, the old RAM, the new video card, the new power supply, or the new case's speaker wire that is to blame. Ack! What to do when you don't have the capacity to test the equipment you have?

I've done lots of stuff tonight. One of the highlights include opening my circa 1995 486, and connecting it's internal speaker wire to my new motherboard. This was done just to see if I was missing the POST beeps due to a messed up speaker or the lack of a POST.

From some old LED's that I tore out of an old Pentium system years ago, a bunch of little plastic plugs, and some tiny little metal thingies that go in the plugs to hold the wires and make elctrical contact with the pins on the motherboard I constructed a "new" speaker wire.

The attempt to assess the problem with bootable Linux floppies was a neat diversion (I never got any of them to work using "rawwrite" to copy .img files to disks in Windows 98).

All in all it wasn't a bad way to spend the evening. Yet a lingering sense of frustration and anger at the whole pc-industrial-complex remains.

[Update: I am ham-handed. The CPU core got chipped by my lack of motor skills. The motherboard wouldn't work because the CPU was trashed. Shouldn't it have made a beep to tell me or something?]