I know you're trying to save money, but I firmly believe that shaving $30 to
$50 off of the total price by getting a cheap no-name motherboard instead of
a motherboard by a reputable manufacturer is going to cost money in the long
run. Getting that cheap motherboard is much more likely to lead to
mysterious system freeze-ups than a decent motherboard, and cause headaches
and frustration. In addition, reputable motherboard manufacturers have
decent websites where you can get updated BIOS's as necessary, in addition
to other drivers and patches, as well as FAQ's about the board itself.
Cheap, no-name boards rarely provide that sort of website.

I made all the systems I sell with reputable motherboards, and the systems I
sell are solid as a rock. In contrast, most systems I see that are causing
their owners problems in the form of freeze-ups, GPF's, IPF's, and Fatal
Exception Errors are systems with cheap motherboards in them. For those
systems, reinstalling the operating system on a clean hard drive can
sometimes make those problems go away for awhile, but they come back. As
soon as I put in a decent motherboard, though, the problems are usually gone
for good.

Please don't be trapped into "false economy" by buying a cheap motherboard.
It just isn't worth it. There are other places to save money.

By the way -- if the seller you referred to was talking about a "FreeTech"
motherboard (rather than a Free-Teac), I used to use those motherboards for
my regular Pentium systems, and found them to be quite stable and reliable.
I don't have any experience with their PII boards, though.  FreeTech was
recently sold, but can be found through:

http://www.freetech.com/

Roxanne Pierce
R2 Systems, San Diego

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Uzi Paz Sent: Friday, July 16, 1999 11:41
>
> But ok, than perhaps I shall go with a Celeron, any recommendations
> for a cheap motherboard which is still reasonable. Most of the stores
> here sell something by PC-Partners which is less than half
> price of the ASUS P2B (which I know that it is excellent), another
> seller told me about something called BX-Free-Teac-PII. In most of
> the reviews, I can see reviews of only the more expensive motherboards,
> while all those that I mentioned are much cheaper and still use the
> 440BX chipset.
>
> Anyone cqan recommend anything?
>
> Thanks,
> Uzi

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