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Pastimes : Computer Learning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike McFarland who wrote (75355)	5/20/2011 10:12:52 PM
From: Mike McFarland	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110652

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.