On Thursday 20 December 2001 01:18 am, Kelly McCormick wrote:
> Ok, maybe it's just a coincidence, but I have a less than 2
> year old Dell Dimension XPS T550 that just crapped out it's second
> motherboard. It first started having problems after I'd had it
> about 3 months and decided to try out Mandrake 7.2 within three or
> four weeks it started having problems booting. To make a long story
> a little shorter after about a year of reformats, and nursing, and
> complaining to Dell, I convinced myself and Dell support that it
> was the mother board. I replaced it, and like magic all problems
> went away. About a month ago, I decided that my system had been
> relatively stable for too long and decided to give linux another
> try. I installed Mandrake 8.1. I have been using it continuously
> for the last four weeks and was really starting to enjoy it.
> Unfortunately this morning my system is once again dead.
> Motherboard again appears to have crapped out. Now personally I
> have a hard time believing that linux had anything to do with it,
> but both times I had been running linux nonstop for approx 1 month
> when the problems first appeared. I would be interested to hear any
> thoughts any of you may have on this.
Problem is mostly Dell. They buy so many mobo's from Intel that
they have the hammer to tell Intel just how to make 'em. Hence
they're not really Intel mobo's, but 'oem spec only' mobo's. Many
corners are cut, often features/hardware found in even low end retail
boards, or Intel's 'regular' boards, are left off, and/or are of
reduced quality (one good example is capacitors, both number and
quality). A quality bios is not to be found. Probly a Phoenix oem
spec only bios is used.
Retail Intel mobo's OTOH, while low performers and lack
configurability, are mostly bulletproof when it comes to reliability
and stabiltility. This isn't really just a Dell problem (ie, cruddy
motherboards, bios, et al). All large ready made vendors do the same
thing, and it's not limited to just the mobo. All the components in
ready made systems are 'oem spec only', aka 'proprietary'. As the
audience for cheap (even if they aren't) ready made PC's increases,
the quality of ready mades drops even further. This has all been
goin on longer than the 'less than two years' since your Dell was
assembled.
That said, your mobo problems probly result from the inferior spec
mobo's and power supplies that Dell uses. Dell is also not renowned
for payin much attention to case and heatsink cooling either. To save
a buck or so, most Dell models don't even have fans on heatsinks that
need one, or even heatsinks on some components that normally should
have one, much less also with a fan (eg, video card).
Have you ever heard Intel advertise that they make mobo's for
Dell? I believe they tryin hide the fact. I suspect it's also why
Dell has been reluctant to move to AMD cpu's. The oem spec only
boards they use will only marginally work with Intel cpu's. It's also
why they only give lip service to providin an OS other than Windoze.
It's called WinTel, low quality components and even non-hardware
that Windoze can run, sort'a kind'a. So no, Mandrake didn't kill
your mobo, Dell and Gates did. ...... YMMV
--
������Tom Brinkman � � Corpus Christi, Texas, USA
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
