Hello all.
Excuse the repost of parts of this info. But I foolishly added this topic to
my reply to Bryce's reply about my Mandrake install problems, and there was
really no relevance to that. It's a separate problem.
I just upgraded my system with a Soyo KT333 Dragon Plus motherboard,
and either (a) I installed it incorrectly (b) it's defective (c) the
components are incompatible (unlikely since I bought it as a bundle with CPU
and RAM) or (d) the company's product brochure lies when they say it supports
Linux. Judging from Soyo's website (which I should've checked more
thoroughly before ordering the thing, I guess) there's no reference to Linux
except to one case where a person was removing it.
Anyway, this is the symptom: Sometimes the system runs for a few hours,
sometimes for 10-15 minutes. It appears that it only hangs when the screen
saver is on - probably not because of the screen saver, but because of some
sort of related inactivity function. I rebooted the machine and checked the
"messages" files, and at the end there are a number of entries that say:
Dazed and confused, do you have an unsual power-saving mode enabled?
I tried to go into BIOS and turn the power-management stuff off, but there
appears to be NO option to do so: only to change between "S1" and "S3"
functions, or both. Is this crazy or what? If I knew I couldn't turn off
power management I wouldn't have bought this board. (Political rant: forcing
computers to "save power" is like telling peole they can't run their
gas-powered lawnmowers when there's a coal-fired power plant next door.)
To add insult to injury, Soyo's email support form on their web page has
about 15 fields, all of which are mandatory. One is for the BIOS version
number. Nowhere on any of the BIOS screens does this number appear. It
doesn't appear at startup, and if it ever flashes to the screen during the
boot process it's too quick to see. Why would they have hidden the version
number, or do you have to be running Microcrap to be able to see it?
I know that a person can load a new version of BIOS into flash, and that if
you screw it up, you have to send it back to the company, so I'm a little
reluctant to do that. Do BIOS's sometimes have secret or hidden options?
Is there perhaps a good resource or website for secret BIOS tips of the
masters? I'm hoping not to need to send this sorry hunk of junk back to the
vendor, but it's not looking good at this point.
Thanks,
Vaughn Treude
(text/plain)