Ken Fox said:
Let me elaborate; I know this has been recently addressed in another thread
having to do with the board I own, a P4P800 Deluxe.
Speaking only for myself, I will not buy another Asus mobo, probably only
Asus products that are either clearly working or clearly defective, such as
an optical drive or (what I also have now) one of their video cards.
Asus used to stand out as the premier mfr. of mobos; in my opinion, this is
no longer true. My P4P800D is by no means a disaster, but it ain't
wonderful, either. I continue to have issues with USB devices (that I'd
thought were solved but they are not). In my opinion there is a problem
with the way they have interfaced their USB ports on this board with the
system bus or the bios. How else can you explain that they seem to agree
there is a problem (see their comments on the 1015 bios update). They seem
to release Bioses that are not fully tested. I've found that if I do flash
a bios the only way to really get it to work (as well as it WILL work, not
perfectly) is to always remove the CMOS battery then short the jumpers then
put the battery back in. I might be willing to do that with this board that
I have so much stomach lining invested in, but I won't do it again. Even
so, every 3 or 4 times I reboot with the 1015 bios I get a screen that shows
that my clearly specified boot order has been changed and the system is
trying to boot from a nonbootable drive even though I've told it 8 times now
there is only one hard drive that is bootable and I've put this drive, only
this drive, in the boot menu. So then I have to boot up into setup and do
it all again. Pi** on them!
I've called Asus America tech support on 3 different issues. The first time
I got a knowledgeable and helpful person who resolved my issue, which was an
assembly error on my part. In my defense, the diagram in the manual was
hugely confusing, and the tech support guy told me he gets calls all day
long about this particular issue. The 2 other times were disastrous, with
the first of these resulting in an hour on the phone mostly on hold time and
then having the tech support person, who had my phone number, intentionally
hang up on me because he did not want to try to help me to resolve my bios
problem. He had my phone number, in fact he asked me for it, and 5 minutes
into the call he hung up on me. I left my line open for half an hour and he
made no attempt to call back. When I called Asus back, there was no record
of that call even though they did have my "case number."
Then I had to call again, waste another 30 minutes on the phone, and when
the guy I spoke with (basically the guy who takes your intial complaint then
forwards you into the next line for a real tech person) told me I should
just pay Asus $25 to get them to send me a new bios chip. All these calls
were "on my dime," as Asus does not have toll free tech support.
I don't hate this company but I don't love them either. My old P4B266 board
gave me a lot less trouble and at the time I used it I had a lot more
respect for this company. They have just become another commodity player in
the marketplace.
I think the era of building your own system has become overly time consuming
and expensive; it lacks the obvious benefits that one got in the past.
Better to buy some very basic preassembled system for bottom dollar and
flush it out with the cards and components you really want. To hell with
Asus. Maybe there is a better mobo company out there, maybe Abit, not sure.
But Asus has gotten about as much money out of me as they will ever get,
except for the peripherals I mentioned above.
Ok, so there is the argument about the quality of the board and how long it
will last. Trust me, the board will become obsolete due to software or
hardware issues a long time before it breaks down, assuming it worked in the
first place.
Just my opinion.
ken
.. But one of your statements was probably the best advice to anyone..