On 19 Nov 2005 at 13:07, Atman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hmm, I didn't see the rest of my original post

It wasn't there for some reason.

> I also stated that I have used a few Gigabyte motherboards and worked on a
> few systems that use their products. The last one in here was a GA-8IEXP if
> I remember correctly. What I do remember was that I would count Gigabyte as
> one of the better manufacturers who help end users. Their website is quick
> enough and easy enough to navigate. I sent in a question and they answered
> it quickly. Some other manufacturers that I've used haven't been so
> cordial.

They were the only Mobo manufacturers which I tried to use their support,
and my impression was less good. I do like their motherboards.

The following is the story of my own motherboard (my current one), and I
must say I learned from it a thing or two about installing system drivers.

I must say, I have a very good opinion about their motherboards, and I
have one myself (GA-7N400Pro2 rev2). The motherboard is fine and I'm very
happy with it, but I did had a few headaches with it when I first
installed it.
The motherboard came with a CD which included the relevant drivers.
weirdly, they put there a buggy beta version of their NForce drivers, and
since immediatly after installing WinXP I installed the drivers by using
the autorun automatic setup in the CD, I didn't know that the drivers were
beta version.

The installation worked without complaints, but after them I got yellow
marks in the device manager for "SMBUS" and for "PCI Memory". The
motherboard worked fine up to two things:
a) Hibernation didn't work correctly and caused damage.
b) Even though I enabled the SMART feature in the BIOS (a tricky thing by
itself), I could not use any SMART program from within Windows neither for
SATA nor for IDE drives.

I tried to update the NForce, SATA and IDE drivers from Gigabyte's site.
It didn't help.

I contacted Gigabyte's support. It took them about a week to give each
response along the correspondence between us, so the correspondance took
about a month.

They first told me that I must allow STR in my BIOS for hibernation to
work. This was a false answer. STR is used for standby - not for
hibernation. I replied that hibernation uses STD instead of STR, and there
is no option to enable STD in the bios. They now replied that the bios
details that I gave them were false, and belong to a mobo different from
the one that I use. I checked it again, and found also this answer to be
false. Again they apologized for the incorrect answer (and for the delay
in their answer), and suggested that I reinstall the OS. They said that I
should use the drivers that are on NVIDIA's site, and Silicon Image site,
rather than the ones of Gigabyte's own site.

At last, this suggestion proved itself. It happend that the drivers on
Gigabyte's site even though better than the buggy ones that came on their
CD, were not the latest (stable) ones. I had no other choice but to
reinstall the OS while using drivers from the web sites of Silicon Image,
and NVIDIA.

Now everything works fine.

Uzi

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