New Compy Advice

[bicostp]

I used to work at a computer repair center. They had a huge box full of dead motherboards, and 90% of them were ECS units. A lot of them came from eMachines (more like eMash**s, amirite) computers, and obviously had a long jumper wire hand soldered to a couple connections. This wasn't just on one or two, it was on all but one of that specific motherboard.

PC Chips and ECS are terrible motherboards. I bought a PC Chips P23G board, and it's loaded with problems:

- PS/2 ports never lose power
- Fan cycling doesn't work; all fans crank at 100% all the time
- Onboard NIC has about a 1 in 20 chance of not working, requiring a really cold boot (unplug the computer)
- Both DDR2 slots are dead
- One of the DDR1 slots is dead
- It randomly decided to corrupt the CMOS once, requiring a manual clear via jumper.
- It thinks the PSU voltages are fluctuating wildly, and the -5v rail is pushing -11v. (I've tried a couple known good PSUs and got the same result.)

Mind you I only bought it 2 years ago, and these problems ahve been slowly cropping up in that time.