Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!

[Warsaw]

Do NOT install Windows 2000. Windows XP has better support for old games than Windows 2000. I speak from experience, since all the computers in my house have Windows 2000 on them except mine, which has XP and 7.

[=sw=warlord]

Alright, so for the past two months I've been fucked over by Asus in pretty much every way possible.
Back in July my motherboard decided to kick the bucket and took my video card with it, Asus have proved again they have one of the worst customer support services going.
Paid for a RMA which they spent just over a month doing jack shit and have now cut my 3 year warranty off and refused to repair my motherboard.
What I need right now is a motherboard which is NOT Asus, supports a Core2Duo E6750, four RAM slots supporting at least 8GB DDR2@1066 and supports PCI-E x16.
This is the bare essentials for what I need right now and I've been out of the loop ever since my motherboard destroyed everything.
The max I can afford right now is £120 and this board needs to last at least a year.
I don't particularly care about which brand as long as it is Not Asus.
Any suggestions on this would be greatly appreciated.

[CrAsHOvErRide]

Do NOT install Windows 2000. Windows XP has better support for old games than Windows 2000. I speak from experience, since all the computers in my house have Windows 2000 on them except mine, which has XP and 7.

I am talking about really old games. They don't run on XP.

I know what I am talking about. I would install 2000 also for reversing etc.

Alright, so for the past two months I've been fucked over by Asus in pretty much every way possible.
Back in July my motherboard decided to kick the bucket and took my video card with it, Asus have proved again they have one of the worst customer support services going.
Paid for a RMA which they spent just over a month doing jack shit and have now cut my 3 year warranty off and refused to repair my motherboard.
What I need right now is a motherboard which is NOT Asus, supports a Core2Duo E6750, four RAM slots supporting at least 8GB DDR2@1066 and supports PCI-E x16.
This is the bare essentials for what I need right now and I've been out of the loop ever since my motherboard destroyed everything.
The max I can afford right now is £120 and this board needs to last at least a year.
I don't particularly care about which brand as long as it is Not Asus.
Any suggestions on this would be greatly appreciated.

ASUS has good quality boards. I would check your PSU or you just had really bad luck.

[=sw=warlord]

CrAsHOvErRide;everything in my set up has been changed, psu cpu, ram and graphics card, each have had the same result with Asus boards.
Two years ago I had a Asus board die on me after the north bridge chipset started to fail on me, two of the four slots would cause blue screen errors and at one point stopped the computer from booting at all.
I sent it of for an RMA which Asus promptly lost in the czech republic for 8 months straight, by the end of it they refused to reply to any of my emails asking where my board was.

This year another Asus board died the same way this time instead of doing what should have been a routine RMA they spent 4 weeks plastering the box and board with out of warranty stickers and cut the warranty down from 3 years to one year so my board was no longer covered, not only that but I had actually paid for the RMA through one of their licensed dealers and even then they refused to repair the board.
When the board first started failing i contacted Asus tech support to find out about an RMA and here's what they had to say.

Dear Valued Customer,

Thank you for contacting ASUS Customer Service.

My name is Jany and it's my pleasure to help you with your problem.

If you just connect one memory to the A1 slot or the B1 slot separately, could the PC POST well?
If so we highly recommend you run only in the functioning set up unless it becomes absolutely necessary for an RMA.

Welcome to refer Troubleshooting & FAQ for ASUS products in ASUS website:
Troubleshooting - http://support.asus.com/troubleshoot...shooting.aspx?
SLanguage=en-us
FAQ - http://support.asus.com/faq/faq.aspx?SLanguage=en-us

If you continue to experience issues in the future, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Best Regards,

Jany

ASUS Customer Service

They may make decent boards but their customer service is absolute shite.


E: just heard back from XFX about the video card, their offering a discount for a new card if i send the old one.
I'm thinking this would be a good card, http://www.xfxsupport.co.uk/upgrade/...e=HD-485X-ZDFC

[CrAsHOvErRide]

Well I never used any customer service so idk. If you think you should change brand then you should go ahead.

I cannot recommend anything because I have only used ASUS and MSI in the past...and I always preferred ASUS. So I guess only options are Gigabyte or MSI.

[Warsaw]

I am talking about really old games. They don't run on XP.

I know what I am talking about. I would install 2000 also for reversing etc.

Define "really old games".

I'm talking about playing shit like Wing Commander, Battlezone I, etc. Hard to get older than Wing Commander without yanking in Doom...which can run on XP.

[CrAsHOvErRide]

I was obviously talking games that don't run on XP because otherwise I would have recommended it. If you have an old laptop you can do something extraordinary and not install a slowass XP on 512MB.

[Warsaw]

You're dodging the question. I don't know any games that refuse to run on XP, and my experience with Windows 2000 is that it slows the machine down with its incessant disk checking and then it has issues running games designed for Windows 98 and older where Windows XP runs them fine.

[CrAsHOvErRide]

Dodging the question? Have you never heard of XP patches for games or DosBox? FYI they have the purpose that games run on XP which previously did not.

Settlers 2 for instance. I prefer running it on the old Kernel rather than installing a slow OS (given the RAM obviously, nothing wrong with XP) with an Emulator.

Settlers, Anno, Worms just to name a few.

[ThePlague]

I just came up with a little wishlist for a future (needed) upgrade for my PC:
Mobo x1
RAM x1
PSU x1
I have a few questions though: Will these parts be compatible with my gfx card, cpu, and case? Those are the only things that I don't want to change right now. And, are the parts I selected good, or are there better alternatives? For say, a little higher price, but it'll make a big, and better, difference.