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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Ed Bott on Shuttle PC

Ed Bott detailed his recent experience with his Shuttle PC. I had a similar problem a while back except, this happened right away, and I was able to return it to Fry's. I am not as patient as Ed, and would not have gone through all that before giving up.

Here is a great quote from my old post:

"Never buy a Shuttle PC. They are buggy, the BIOS releases are buggy, and if you read the release notes for the BIOS you’d understand. If you even read the forums for but a brief moment you’d come to the same conclusion."

Oh, and I will never buy a Shuttle PC. If you are building a PC yourself, you are better off getting a small form factor case (like the SilverStone SG01) taht can take a Mini-ATX motherboard. You will have a lot of selection to chose from any all standard components.

 

Thursday, December 28, 2006 1:50:11 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
If you think that's the worst SFF box, listen to this...

I bought an AOpen SFF barebones and added only components on the hardware compatibility list for parents-in-law. It never worked reliably. Quite often on boot, the CPU would issue the "overheating" noise. Yet the CPU, a Celeron D was a genuine, boxed item chosen because it was (and still is) on the HCL.

After swapping parent-in-law computer for one of mine, I lived with it for a while then got so fed up I decided to upgrade the BIOS. The problem now was the BIOS stopped immediately and said the CPU was not supported. So I decided to downgrade the BIOS again - only the BIOS stopped before it got to the boot-up part, preventing any other OS/BIOS up/downgrade from happening.

So a few emails to AOpen tech support (in another country) and they told me that even though the CPU was on the HCL, it wasn't compatible... And that the only way to make it compatible was by de-soldering a surface mount resistor on the motherboard and that this would void my warranty. They even supplied a picture with the resistor circled.

I decided to have a go at desoldering - damn tricky with something so small - and everything works fine now. Guess what though - I'm not buying an AOpen barebones again.
RichB
Tuesday, January 02, 2007 9:28:09 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
Wow, that's sucks worse than my story.
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