Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but here goes. That new mainboard is
interacting very poorly with the old drivers still installed on your
operating system, primarily because there are Emachines specific drivers
trying to interact with HP hardware and BIOS. Factory restore discs are
very particular to each manufacturer, as they contain only a subset of
drivers suited to the expected hardware configuration, rather than the
full driver set offered by retail copies of Windows. Your shop did a
very bad thing to you by not replacing your old eMachines mainboard with
an identical replacement part. Shame on them for doing that. They need
to replace this motherboard with the right one at their expense for the
screw-up, honestly. Barring the cooperation of your shop, you have a
couple options. First one is to wipe and restore your system using an HP
factory restore CD appropriate to that motherboard. Second is to wipe
and restore your machine using a retail copy of Windows and then
download missing drivers from HP. Third is to install drivers from HP
onto your existing Windows installation using Safe Mode to bypass what
does not work, though this third option is temporary at best, and
unworkable at worst. At this point, your eMachines restore disc has been
rendered useless by the hardware change. Most manufacturers lock their
restore discs so they only work on the right model of computer. Hope
things work out for you soon.


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [PCBUILD] What is reasonable to expect after paying to replace
mother board?
From: Bruce Lund <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, September 02, 2010 6:42 am
To: [log in to unmask]

I know a lot of you do this for a living so I am trying to figure out
what is fair. I have an eMachines D2880 running XP that crashed. The
power supply was bad which I replaced myself, but that did not revive
the computer so I took it to a local shop. Because I didn't want to lose
programs et al I agreed to pay for replacement mother board installation
which ran $200 (not to mention being in the shop for an extended period
of time.)

Since then, I have had numerous program and system crashes. (BSOD) They
are saying there were system problems before, which might be true, but
the computer was NOT crashing. Biggest issue was Firefox hanging up. But
now neither the computer or programs on it are stable.

Oddly, Firefox crashed incessantly after the repair (could be 10 times
in an hour), but that mirrored the problem I had on multiple computers I
used at the library while mine was in the shop. Hadn't had the problem
before. And (knock on wood) it has been OK for the last couple days.

Even  though this is an eMachine, after the new motherboard was
installed, an HP splash screen appears on boot up. Could that have
something to do with it?

At any rate, is it fair of me to expect my computer to work at least as
well following this repair as it did before? Or did I throw away $250,
including the power supply?

Bruce





 Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
 Digest mode - visit our web site:
 http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml

            Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
                    Digest mode - visit our web site:
                   http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml