Okay, it's really about time that motherboard manufacturers get with it and finally start providing some decent documentation. I just got a new AOpen AX4B-533 motherboard with an Intel Pentium 4 2.40(B) GHz CPU, but the stupid board won't boot. It's supposed to be an awesome motherboard to overclock, and it's got USB 2.0 support, 533 MHz FSB support, PC-2100 DDR SDRAM support, 4X AGP support, and uses the i845E chipset. The manual is incomplete, however (and as usual is written in poorly translated English from Chinese), and doesn't provide an LED map or a jumper legend or anything. There's a status LED that stays on that I know holds the key to what's wrong with the system, but there is nothing to explain what the LED is for. Their website, of course, sheds no additional light on the problem, so basically I'm screwed - so I had to take it back to our local supplier. What is so hard about providing a few more pages of actually useful information to the manual? I think it's high time that consumers start to expect more from these companies, and only buy products with better support and documentation.

UPDATE: resolved the issue, but we did it the easy way - got a different board (the other one was bad). The new board is an MSI 845E Max mainboard (all the same specs as above). It works wonderfully. MSI even has auto-update webpages (Live Driver, Live BIOS) for their motherboards (which can automatically scan for new BIOS, drivers, and utilities for your particular board just like WindowsUpdate does) - it's pretty slick.

I am bummed about moving to Windows XP, however, as it doesn't support many DOS batch commands (like Choice and Start - which breaks 5 to 10 batch files I've written over the past few years and use on a daily basis), and there seem to be some issues with Microsoft's Virtual Java Machine (like it's not included, and you can't download it from Microsoft). So, aside from some minor annoyances, I'm computing at a much faster pace at work now.   =)

UPDATE: XP does support some additional DOS commands, but they're not included, so you have to copy them over from Win98, then you can use them - just put them in the same directory as your batch scripts and they'll run... mostly (some switches might not work). Also, I guess Microsoft doesn't want to play the Java game any more so they're not supporting Java in XP. You can, however, get the latest Java plug-in from Sun, but frankly it doesn't work as well as the Virtual Java Machine in Win98. -- Sigh --

UPDATE: On 02/05/2003, there was an article on ZDNET on how (and why - court order) Microsoft doesn't bundle the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) with Windows XP. Very interesting.