Half a Rant

Today I have a half rant. Maybe its because I don’t really feel well or maybe I am just half mad. The half rant goes to ASUS. Let me explain the reason and see if you agree.

A friend of mine, runs a local convenience store. He was born and raised in India, but he has lived here in the USA for many years and he is a citizen of the U.S. I wont tell you his real name because I can pronounce it, much less try to spell it. I have just always called him Abu (from the Simpson’s cartoon). I buy almost all of my petrol and cigarettes from Abu and have for the last 5 years. Over that period of time we have come to know one another fairly well and while I had my last back surgery, he filled my wife’s car with gas and would not accept her payment. He is just a very nice guy.

Sometime during our many talks, I helped him with a technical issue he was having with his computer. Whatever the problem was, I told him what I thought would fix it and apparently it did. The next time I saw him he was very happy and told me it worked. About a month or so later, we had some bad thunderstorms and lightening had hit his store. The lightening strike knocked out his security cameras as well as the computer network he had set up to control the prices and cash register.

I had stopped in one morning to buy gas on my way to work when I noticed the pumps were off. I went inside and Abu was working an old cash register and a calculator. He told me about the lightening and that his pumps were down because the computer got zapped and they controlled his pumps. He said he called the company that installed everything to come have a look but it was going to be a week before they could get to him. A week!! I told him I had to go to work, but I would stop by that evening and look things over to see if I could help patch things so he would not lose a weeks worth of sales.

That evening I stopped in and he showed me the ‘safety room’. I looked at his camera connections and security monitor and I followed the burns on the wall to a box. I opened that box and it was basically a home made power supply with a couple of circuit breakers. The monitor, the cameras and the computer were all connected and got their power source from this box (instead of being plugged into a wall socket). I figured out that this box was some sort of homemade APC / UPS. This ‘box’ had its own breaker that was tripped. I flipped it off and then on again. Then I switched off and on the ‘outside’ breakers where the other things were plugged in and everything came up. After a few seconds, I started to smell the nasty, something electronic is burning, smell. I shut everything off. I went to my truck and got my multi-meter and moments later I figured out a cap had fried (basically doing its job keep everything else from frying). I went to the local electrical supply house and bought a big cap to plug in its place. 5$ and 30 minutes later and Abu was running again.

He was so happy he did not know what to do. He bought me gas and cigarettes even tho I tried to tell him the cap only cost 5$ but he would not have any of me not accepting payment. So I accepted the gas and cigarettes and thanked him.

As I mentioned before, Abu and I have become good friends. We talk about many things and he was aware of what I did for a living in the past and currently. One morning, on my way to work, I stopped for a soft drink, he asked me if I would build a PC for his personal use. I told him to pick out what he wanted and I would build it. Then he asked me to pick out the parts for him. He said he had 3 restrictions, he could not spend more than 1200$, he had a particular case that he wanted already selected and whatever I built must run Vista because he already had a brand new copy of Vista that a salesman gave him.

So, with all of that in mind, I went searching on several Online stores to get the biggest bang for Abu’s buck.

I have been a long time fan of ASUS motherboards. I feel and have always felt that they build a quality product that performs and performs well. Abu would be getting an ASUS mother board. I asked him if he wanted Intel or AMD and he said he wanted AMD. So I selected and AMD Dual Core 6000 cpu and an ASUS M2N32 – Premium Vista Edition motherboard.

http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=101&l3=300&l4=0&model=1553&modelmenu=1

I figured that this board would do anything Abu wanted to do with a pair of DVD Burners, a pair of SATA 250gig drives and 4gigs of ram. Oh yeah, I selected a 8800GTS SLi (512mg) Vid card. Abu already had a 22” monitor (Samsung Flat panel with 2ms response and a 3000:1 contrast ratio). I gave him the list of what to buy and where to buy it. Four days later, he called and he told me it had all come in.

We made arrangements for me to build the computer in his store so he could observe and learn. The assembly took about 45 minutes (even with him asking questions). Everything went smooth as silk. Even the mounting of the heatsink on the cpu. With everything in place, it was time to flip the switch to watch the fans spin and make sure the unit ‘posted’ and to make any adjustments in the bios.

Abu received the honours and everything worked. When we went into the bios, there were only 2 or 3 small adjustments that needed to be made (personal prefs really, nothing overly ‘function’, like turning off the logo and turning on quick boot). Before shutting down we opened the Vista box and put the disc in the 1^st DVD drive and restarted the machine.

When it rebooted, the Vista DVD began loading. It went for a while transferring data from the DVD to the HDD and then it was time for the 1^st re-boot. This is where the half rant starts. When the system re-booted and started to continue the Vista install, I got a blue screen explaining there was a ACPI error and that the BIOS was not Compatible with VISTA.

Huh? The name of the board was “ASUS M2N32 – Premium Vista Edition motherboard” with the emphasis on Vista Edition. How could a Vista Edition board be not compatible with Vista? I went thru the usual checks to make sure it wasn’t something I had done wrong, including checking all the BIOS settings and then reloading the software. Second attempt and I got the same answer, there was a ACPI error and the BIOS is not compatible with VISTA.

Before I selected the board, I read the reports and the reviews on this board and everything was positive. No where was there any mention that there was an issue with loading Vista. I did a little digging and discovered on some off-the-wall ‘motherboard gripes’ site that MANY people had the same issue. The Motherboard had already gone thru 3 or 4 BIOS revisions, but (some) people were still having issues.

I went back to explain to ABU what was going on and how to fix it, but I told him it was up to him. Flash the BIOS, hoping it worked and continue loading Vista or leave as is and load Windows XP. I explained to him how, that if the update went bad, the board would not work.

He understood the risk and decided to go with a BIOS update.

ASUS has this neat little feature where you can store the ‘working BIOS’ so if your update goes bad it can be brought back, sort of like the restore function in Windows. I downloaded the proper BIOS (again from gathering info from other sites) that I had determined would work best from his new machine. I also downloaded the installer. Insert the homemade cd and within 5 minutes everything was done. ASUS has some decent tools for doing this.

After the update and a reboot and then another as suggested, I went back to the Vista install and everything went pain free from that point. My rant is this, Why would you name a board @#$%^& Premium Vista Edition if it wont accept and load Vista? Why would you ever put a board with that name into production, this was not a proto type, it was a production board, why would you do it until you were absolutely sure that Vista would work with it? I thought it funny enough to call ASUS customer service and just ask them that very question. I have worked in their (the ASUS) end of the business for nearly 20 years and that kind of thing would not happen and if it did, somebody would be fired if not shot. Who knows, maybe somebody did get fired.

I just thought it very ironic that ASUS would advertise a board and even give it Vista edition as part of its name and yet, as is, from the factory, it would not load Vista. There have been at least 7 BIOS updates and an 8^th one is in beta stage. The 4^th change is supposedly where Vista would install if you had 2gigs of RAM or less. The 5^th or 6^th change allowed more than 2gigs of Ram AND Vista (altho the board is rated to accept 8gigs).

I will say this. Once the OS loaded and we got done with all the OS updates, that darn machine is a smoker. We got a 5.9 (highest I had ever seen) on the user experience rating built in to Vista. The board (with some help from the chassis I am sure) is very cool and the chassis / fans / video card are very quiet. Other than the spinning of the DVD Burner when loading a disk, you almost have to check to see if the machine is on. Everything is running very smoothly and when you click on an application, it pops to the screen almost before you get your mouse moved from the click point (Icon or start menu). Very nice assembly, very easy (other than the BIOS issue and it really was an easy fix) and very smooth.

I give them a half rant. A novice (like Abu) would have been hosed until after the holidays. ASUS tech support was closed for the holidays on the 3 phone calls I made (to pacify Abu) and they yet to return the one message I did leave. Other than that, we have one of the nicest, smoothest builds I have ever run across. The board had room for Ol’ Large Fingers Vettie and everything went together very easily. Again, even the BIOS upgrade was easy. Abu would have not figured that out on his own and ASUS would have had a hard time explaining what was wrong and how to fix it. Even if a newer BIOS was available, the one it shipped with should have accepted a Vista install... Rant complete.