Tom's New A7V System

[Guest]

Well, I for one am dying to see if Tom's machine from the new feature article suffers from any of the problems encountered by me and many others on this list. I have virtually the same system as Tom just put together, except that I went for a All-In-Wonder Radeon graphics card. I expected flakiness from a latest generation system, but it gets annoying at times. I upgraded the bios to 1005C, tried to upgrade the Via4-in-1 drivers (fails during reboot, how do I tell if it worked?), tried to upgrade the promise drivers (just the Windows drivers, right? The bios upgrade from the promise site won't install if the chip is on a MoBo!). Now my system is just as flaky as before and takes much longer to boot up. I'm going backwards! Tom, if you're reading this, please post your detailed setup: bios, VIA drivers, promise drivers, chip temp, etc. Tired minds want to know....

 

[Ncogneto]

which via drivers are you using? have you tried the 4.28 bets drivers yet? also, only install the via agp driver not the busmaster drivers.Get the updated promise drviers from asus's website not promose's. Last but not least if you are usiong the ati card install the via agp driver after the radeon drivers....Ati drivers overwrite the via agpgart driver.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[Bubba]

I agree, Tom really needs to post more detailed specs.

After you format your drive, Do a clean install of Windows. The immediately put on the VIA drivers from the CD that came with your board. Then you can put on any version of the VIA drivers you would like to upgrade to.
The VIA drivers on the CD do more than the ones you can download from the web. Don't ask, I don't know. I just know, that I have 100% success rate if I put on the VIA drivers from the CD and I have a 100% failure rate if I just try to put on the ones that you can get off the web. And no, the version doesn't matter.

 

[Guest]

Thats a handy thing to store for later reference, Thanks Bubba



So long and thanks for all the fish

 

[Guest]

Well, I'm not sure if I installed VIA 4.28 or not. That's certainly what I tried to do, but the installation hangs the machine and puts a vertical white line on the display. I'm thinking they haven't sorted out the VIA/ATI thing yet. And yes, I've installed the original drivers that came with the CD first, then the ATI drivers, then sequentially upgraded bios, VIA drivers, promise drivers. The latest combination is definitely slower boot-up wise than previous combinations and instability is still present.

Don't get me wrong, when I'm just doing normal computing, the thing is FAST. T'm especially impressed with the hard drive performance. Boot-ups used to be REALLY fast too. The ATI card works great, except that the switching to TV mode or back and VCR capability is flaky, especially after resuming from sleep (now disabled). Some devices are inaccessible after sleep mode as well. Disabling sleep mode (standby actually) wasn't such a pain until the boot speed went to sub-tortoise. Oh well, hopefully in time....

 

[Mahimahi]

YES PLEASE TOM,
Give us your setup walk-through just like I asked in an earlier topic on this forum.