Maybe your philosophy should have been somethign like this:
	
	Friends don't let friends buy motherboards from Fry's


Frys is good for cables and simple things, but everything else I have
purchased there has died and needed to be returned. Eventually I got
smart and quit buying any thing there more complicated than cables. Just
my opinion though.



On Mon, 2006-03-06 at 23:11 -0700, George Toft wrote:
> I went through Fry's Special 3 ECS boards before I adopted this philosophy:
> 
> 	Friends don't let friends buy ECS motherboards
> 
> 
> So after the ECS fiasco, I bought an ASUS board as I wanted a big name 
> brand.  The Fry's return specialist asked me if I wanted the Instant 
> Exchange Warranty.  Hmmm....since I was buying a board as its 
> predecessor failed, I said "yes."  6 weeks later ASUS mobo died 
> (replaced for free).  18 months later ASUS#2 died (replacement was an 
> Abit board, and was free).  2 months later, Abit died (replaced for 
> free).  I'm now on Abit #2 - sure glad I spent the $30 for that Instant 
> Replacement Warranty :)
> 
> George
> 
> 
> 
> Mark Jarvis wrote:
> > 
> > First, sad story: A month or so ago I bought one of those ECS Nforce3-A 
> > motherboard/Sempron 3100+ specials at Fry's. I was basically unable to 
> > get it to boot from my existing Linux & Windows installations. After 
> > fighting for a (hellish) week trying to find a way to force booting from 
> > the existing installations, I finally gave up and re-did all OS 
> > installations. Thank goodness most of my data was in a separate data 
> > partition and remained pretty much OK. (To add to my confusion, I could 
> > use a Windows multi-boot diskette to start the boot, using its boot.ini 
> > to transfer to an installation, then complete a windows boot as usual. I 
> > could then see all drives & windows usable partitions, so the disks were 
> > see-able, just not bootable!) It didn't help that a diskette drive and 
> > power supply died during that time and that half of a pair of 512MB 3200 
> > memory sticks was DOA.  !@#$%^&*!
> > 
> > OK, I'm now up & running,
> > 
> > When Linux kernels started to get too big to fit on a diskette, I was 
> > relieved to discover Smart Boot Manager and have used it extensively at 
> > home and at school to boot into any available Windows or Linux 
> > partition. BUT--SBM no longer works on my machine! It doesn't even 
> > display the partitions! Obviously, there is some sort of horrible 
> > mobo/HD interaction at work here.
> > 
> > Has anyone else bought one of those ECS specials? What was your experience?
> > 
> > I was hoping that my problems were due to my HDs. They're biggish--two 
> > 120s and a 160, but not really all THAT big. Since Fry's has the same 
> > offer on again, I was thinking of upgrading my wife's box, hoping that 
> > her smaller, older disks--two Maxtor 80s--would not be a problem. That 
> > SBM thing, however, really bothers me.
> > 
> > Any comments, hints, experiences, and/or suggestions gratefully received.
> > 
> > -mj-
> > 
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