a comment about how PCs are built...
So...I was never able to install the ethernet drivers
for the motherboard for this pc I'd assembled. I tried
to be careful about installing the drivers in the right
order, and rebooting a couple of times. I made an honest
effort, maybe spent a couple of hours on this. Like I
said earlier, I can get maybe a half hour a day to fiddle
with this new PC of mine as a hobby and that is about it.
It seems to me, that a motherboard ought to be fully
functional right out of the box--you give it a power
supply, add your CPU, and you're running. This business
of having to install the chipset drivers, the USB drivers,
the SATA drivers, the Ethernet drivers is a bit silly.
All the software to drive those things probably only adds
up to 10 or 20 mb--it ought to be loaded on a chip at
the factory.
I know a video driver can be a 100mb+ affair, but we
add video cards and vga drivers later. I know that I
had video without installing drivers so basic video
is also not a problem.
Anyway, seems to me you could have all those drivers
on the mainboard for no real extra cost--after all the
BIOS that already comes with your PC is there, so maybe
the rest of the system controller software ought to be
in there too. How that all pairs up with the OS is
beyond me--I like the idea that a small efficient OS
comes with the mainboard. I never was able to get MSI's
linux derivative 'Winki 3' to run. The funny thing is
that I had no trouble running Linux mint from a USB
drive, and no trouble booting Windows 7 from the DVD,
so there may very well have been a hardware failure on
this motherboard that is intended to be paired with
Winki to work, I don't know.
Anyway, that is two cents from this newbie PC assembler!
I RMAed the motherboard back to Newegg and got a different
board. |
