What the hell is going on with my computer...

It shouldn't be, but I have never dealt with Gigabyte MB or SiS chipsets.

Print up the directions and mark them off with a pencil as you do them. Make sure you don't skip any.

But you are generally right - read through the bios release notes (should be near the bios download) and see if anything sounds like it might relate to your problem. If there is anything remotely close then upgrade.

What you don't want to do is burn out your rom (yes I have done this) by writing too many times (at the request of support staff I re-wrote a bios about 2 dozen times in the course of 1 week, which consequently killed the bios chip.)

well, my bios is F5, so it's fairly recent.

I've updated all the drivers i could find.

i guess i'll just spend tomorrow calling up a) the vendor, and b) the gigabyte people and try to get this thing working.

LF

heh well its less scary these days (assumin yer motherboard maker has a windows program to do it without bein stuck in dos, and ya have a UPS) ;P but seriously if yer bios is older'n september, it might be worth upgrading (that mention of the codec in the whats changed on sept 13th i think seems pretty suspicious)


but honestly yeah upgrade all you can from the SIS site

even tho my board is asus, i use the nvidia (they whom have made my chipset) drivers cause they're ALWAYS the most current

yeah.. im not a terribly huge fan of SIS or via chipsets after numerous, NUMEROUS problems i've had in the past... with intel's its generally best to stick with intel chipsets if ya can (they're generally the most trouble-free)... and with amd's its pretty much nvidia or cross yer fingers at this point there have been SOOOOOOOO many problems over the years with via's

<<flashing the bios is the scariest thing to do, ever.>>

Especially if your computer crashes in the middle of it (as happened to me once).

AFAIK there is no such thing. Hyperthreading is integrated into the CPU architecture. Windows XP and probably 2000 detect it automatically and treat your system as though it had dual CPUs.

Anyway. All I can kick in here is to make sure you have up-to-date drivers, particularly for the sound chip. The BIOS update is also a good idea, even if it seems scary. Worst comes to worse you fritz the BIOS and they swap in a new board. I don't think that's very likely to happen though, I have flashed many a BIOS in my day and have not had any issues with anything going wrong.

n.b.: I hate SiS. I have had bad luck with their stuff. If you cannot resolve this problem and decide to go with another motherboard, I personally recommend the Asus P4P800 Deluxe. You will have to reinstall Windows but it'll be worth it. I have used Asus motherboards with Intel chipsets for years (since 1998 if I recall) and they have always been excellent. I think there is something to be said for using Intel chipsets with Intel CPUs...

Woohoo! I finally gave up and reinstalled windows. Everything seems to be running fine, even without a full format. So, it looks like some stupid drivers were fighting and not playing nice, even though I reinstalled everything like 40 times.

I'd like to thank you all profusely for your attempts to help me out

LF