Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Some time ago, I swore to myself that I would never buy a Shuttle mainboard again. I also said I would never buy an ECS board.
But just to see what the fuss is all about, I went out and bought myself some new toys this weekend, including a Shuttle AK32L and a pair of ECS K7S5As (and a couple of AthlonXP 1700+ chips). All told, this little trip cost me a hair over $260, which is entirely reasonable.
Out of box, the Shuttle looked like a decent mid-quality product, about the same as DFI or Biostar or FIC. Complete manual, no obvious signs of horrible chinese mangling... a decent product.
ECS was not so generous with their product.
I set up the shuttle and one of the K7S5As with XP1700s, and the last with Clocker's old Duron 850. I mated the XPs with 256MB crucial DDR RAM and the duron with a pair of 256MB generic SDRAM DIMMs. I rounded the systems out with ATI 7000s for the XPs and a crappy Trident Blade for the duron. Everybody got a Linksys NIC and a 4GB hard disk.
I went ahead and used my standard Win2000 via-chipset ghost image on the Shuttle board, which set it up perfectly. No problems there AT ALL.
The other two I decided to do something different. XP Pro.
The duron worked fairly well. At first it refused to power on. At some point I took out the RAM and switched it between sockets. For whatever reason, it decided to work that way. It crashed during the XP install once, but it started back up without any problems, and the install completed. Other than that, it's been OK. It's now running a 3D screensaver and doing perfectly OK.
The other ECS board, though... amazingly enough it powered on first time. But it didn't detect its hard disk or CD-ROM. The components I used were old, but functional. I switched to just the hard disk. No joy. Just the CD? Nothing. Popped in a Fireball AS. Still nothing.
Finally, in desperation, I popped in a 2GB maxtor I had just been playing with yesterday. Spun right up. Hm... I looked, and the jumper was set to cable select. OK... Tried the fireball again, jumper set to CS. It worked, too. What the $%#? Oh well. I popped the CD-ROM back in, with my XP CD, and let it do its work.
No problems on install, but it failed to join my domain. Piece of crap. Grumble grumble.
Finished the install, went to look, and the damn thing had given itself an APIPA address instead of one from my DHCP server. Weird. Release/Renew and it STILL came up APIPA. Checked device manager, looks OK. Rebooted. Different cable? Nope. Still APIPA. Bad NIC? Put in an SMC card, loaded the drivers... nothing; still APIPA. Tried a Realtek, nothing. Enabled NetBEUI on it and on one of my other machines, nothing. Checked to make sure my switch had a link light for that port. It did. Tried crossover directly to my DHCP server. Nothing. Fdisked and loaded 98. Still nothing but APIPA.
That's the point I'm at with this machine right now. No idea what's going on. It's a piece of junk.
So for the frustration of my day, I think I'd be willing to give shuttle another shot. ECS, I don't know. I think I'm just going to take that board back
But just to see what the fuss is all about, I went out and bought myself some new toys this weekend, including a Shuttle AK32L and a pair of ECS K7S5As (and a couple of AthlonXP 1700+ chips). All told, this little trip cost me a hair over $260, which is entirely reasonable.
Out of box, the Shuttle looked like a decent mid-quality product, about the same as DFI or Biostar or FIC. Complete manual, no obvious signs of horrible chinese mangling... a decent product.
ECS was not so generous with their product.
I set up the shuttle and one of the K7S5As with XP1700s, and the last with Clocker's old Duron 850. I mated the XPs with 256MB crucial DDR RAM and the duron with a pair of 256MB generic SDRAM DIMMs. I rounded the systems out with ATI 7000s for the XPs and a crappy Trident Blade for the duron. Everybody got a Linksys NIC and a 4GB hard disk.
I went ahead and used my standard Win2000 via-chipset ghost image on the Shuttle board, which set it up perfectly. No problems there AT ALL.
The other two I decided to do something different. XP Pro.
The duron worked fairly well. At first it refused to power on. At some point I took out the RAM and switched it between sockets. For whatever reason, it decided to work that way. It crashed during the XP install once, but it started back up without any problems, and the install completed. Other than that, it's been OK. It's now running a 3D screensaver and doing perfectly OK.
The other ECS board, though... amazingly enough it powered on first time. But it didn't detect its hard disk or CD-ROM. The components I used were old, but functional. I switched to just the hard disk. No joy. Just the CD? Nothing. Popped in a Fireball AS. Still nothing.
Finally, in desperation, I popped in a 2GB maxtor I had just been playing with yesterday. Spun right up. Hm... I looked, and the jumper was set to cable select. OK... Tried the fireball again, jumper set to CS. It worked, too. What the $%#? Oh well. I popped the CD-ROM back in, with my XP CD, and let it do its work.
No problems on install, but it failed to join my domain. Piece of crap. Grumble grumble.
Finished the install, went to look, and the damn thing had given itself an APIPA address instead of one from my DHCP server. Weird. Release/Renew and it STILL came up APIPA. Checked device manager, looks OK. Rebooted. Different cable? Nope. Still APIPA. Bad NIC? Put in an SMC card, loaded the drivers... nothing; still APIPA. Tried a Realtek, nothing. Enabled NetBEUI on it and on one of my other machines, nothing. Checked to make sure my switch had a link light for that port. It did. Tried crossover directly to my DHCP server. Nothing. Fdisked and loaded 98. Still nothing but APIPA.
That's the point I'm at with this machine right now. No idea what's going on. It's a piece of junk.
So for the frustration of my day, I think I'd be willing to give shuttle another shot. ECS, I don't know. I think I'm just going to take that board back
