Well, yesterday was the day. Although I back everything up to windows, i'm still unhappy about all the reconfiguring i'm gonna need reinstalling Slack. I had it just the way I wanted it too. But for some unknown reason *coughoperatorcougherrorcough*, I royally goofeded my system during a package upgrade. On an upnote, I splurged today! I went to a dinky little computer shop nearby and bought a used/old as dirt system that i'm gonna use as a firewall between the conspiracy and my computer;
Server case (yay!)
P200 Overdrive (so-so)
Tape backup (blahh...)
Floppy
Matrox Mystique
Newer MB w/ On-board Sound, 2 USB, 2 PS/2 etc...
All for a walk-in price of 30 dollars. All works too...
I've got a 50X cd and a 1.6Gig HD for it.
The rest is a severely minimal, bare-bones Slack install for iptables. So, there you go. A general post about my last two days in which the subject will change rapidly within the next 24 hours or the forum will autodestruct. Have a nice day all!

Heh, my mobo is suffering from the death of a thousand errors, from memory errors to drive and pci bus errors. I even have to slightly underclock it to keep it stable ATM....*sigh*

Now that's a new one to me. Sounds like a new board is in order...On that note, you or anyone else know where I can get two 32M simms for less than a billion friggin' dollars? LOL

Aussie. Right now you can pick up a nice Duron system for EXTREMELY cheap (except for the ram).

check this setup out:

AMD Duron 850Mhz --- $38
ECS K7S5A SiS® 735 --- $52
Liteon 52X Cdrom drive -- $30
256mb crucial pc2100 -- $82
CHIEFTEC Server Chasis (Workstation Tower) Model DX-01WD-300W; AMD Approved Power Supply -- $59
Alpha 8045 heatsink-- $35
Sunon 80MM fan (for heatsink) -- $7

= $183

shipping +50

=$233

And then you could always upgrade the duron to an XP 1600+ for $113 or T-bird 950Mhz for $58

Nice try therion12
I think I'd rather get a new mobo and run my 1g Athlon at 1.333 again

Oh wow, tell me what you are running now and i will recommend you a good setup. I thought you were on some pentuim pro lol..

1gig T-bird on a KT7A rev 1.0, the rev 1.0 is the problem. I'm thinking of replacing the KT7 with an Asus. The next full comp I build is going to be a SMP athlon box in about 8 to 12 weeks.

I would love to agree with you, but Asus's quality control is going down the drain right now. I recommend getting an Abit KR7-A if you have the money (its expensive). Or you could also get the award winning Epox 8KHA+ which is the board i own for $100.

Either way, make sure you pick one up with the KT266A chipset. Do some browsing around and see which features you would want to have. (like RAID etc).

I'm not going to completely rebuild this box, just replace the mobo, throw in a couple of 40g drives and use it for a game/media server.

Honestly, I have to say that i've only owned ONE mb that wasn't an ASUS and it was the one that sucked.. I love ASUS and i've not had one out of the 4 i've had do anything odd or crap out. So that's what I always recommend. I know everyone else has their pref though. I'm sitting fine with my A7V-E and 1G T-Bird. I love the BIOSs' clock frequ. step-up function. I only wish AMD hadn't SOLD-OUT with their Windows XP specific processor. I was so sad to hear that. Is Cyrix still around? lol

actually YES Cyrix is still around oddly enough. I personally think that both Abit and Asus make great MBs however I tend to like th BIOS on the abit boards a lot better and I have to personally lean toward them with the basic setup as well.

I guess Asus is not bad, I have a Asus board myself (a 815i Solano 2 board) and i've yet to have a problem with it. So from my experience, Asus is awesome.

I had my Epox for a few months and its been rock since. Well see once i add some more stuff.

The Asus A7V-266E is faster clock-per-clock than all the other KT266A boards though, but it overclocks most poorly out of all of them. I guess if you are using it for a fileserver than you dont care about overclocking. Nothing special on the motherboard. You still have dip switches to set the type of processor which you would think would be ruled out already (as with most motherboard companies). Overall its a great board, can't complain (other than i wish it had a 100% BIOS setup like epox)

Honestly, I have no clue why the new Asus 266 board would still have jumpers. My A7V-E is about a year old was already jumperless. The BIOS clock frequ. setting is all there and ready to overclock. But oh well...I've never heard of Epox before and maybe that's why I don't try new boards. I tried a Future Power KT133 board a while back and it sucked. So my experimenting left me with a bad taste I guess..

I was weary about the quality too, but Epox truly does make great motherboards. Just make sure you update the BIOS if you use a Athlon XP processor and you should be fine.

Personally, i'm waiting for EPoX to release their next killer motherboard, based on the KT333 chipset. MSI already has one out but i heard that MSI has glitches in there motherboard sometimes.