ECS K7VTA3 issue...

[squirrel]

I've got an ECS K7VTA3 motherboard.

I've had lots of problems that remained unsolved, even after I flashed the BIOS to the most recent version, an updated all drivers for the devices I have (under Win98SE).

Here's what happens:

- system crashes (this is not so surprising though)
- will randomly not boot until ready (locks somewhere near the end) rebooting once or twice and I'm okay... cannot predict
- always glitches while listening to mp3s, midis, wavs... (sounds like an old vinyl disc) Remark: the same result happens when I remove the SoundBlaster card and use the built-in AC97 sound with proper drivers)
- sometimes freezes when I leave the computer idle for a long time (when I come back to the computer, the screen is black and jammed)
- even got this one (which is more surprising, considering that I had made NO changes, I simply rebooted): the BIOS told me there was some kind of malfunctionning so it resetted the settings to defaults !!! what the... ?!?

This is not talking about all other problems I have, for example, trying to connect my USB Digital Camera for example, which will unpredictably fail or not! ... the list goes on and on.

Also surprising... the vendor told me he had NO problems at all dealing with this particular board, which he was selling very often.

Should this be considered a motherboard malfunctionning? Have I just been unlucky and got a damaged one? I find this all really surprising, I never had any trouble with system configuration in the past. I started over with clean formats 3-4 times, adding devices one after the other... nothing seemed to help...

System:
ECS K7VTA3 motherboard
Ahtlon TB 1.2GHz (266)
1 x 256MB DDR RAM
350W Power supply
Asus GeForce-2 7100T Magic
SoundBlaster 128 (PCI)
SMC 10T NIC (PCI)
WesternDigital 30GB UltraATA/100
Asus 34x CD-Rom
Pionneer 16x DVD-Rom

Do you think this could be an issue related to the chipset ? Should I believe in another motherboard using the same chipset (VIA KT266) (for example, MSI K7 Pro 266 which is said to be one of the good ones), or should I think about AMD's 760 ? (for example MSI K7 Master? (even though the south bridge is still VIA))

Thanks for your help! I'm not so scared about the cost, I want a fast yet stable system.

 

[Guest]

Squirrel,
I had similar problems withthis board and it about drove me nuts (Squirrel - Nuts, get it? yuk, yuk). Anyway I seem to have finally solved my problems by:
1. getting the latest via 4in1 drivers
2. Only enabling USB ports 1&2, who needs four?
3. Disabling serial comm port 2, who needs two?
4. Most importantly - updated Win98 SE Uhcd.sys drivers (to v4.10.2223)
The real change came after the Uhcd.sys driver update. The other changes had more to do with freeing up IRQs to resolve possible conflicts with my video. This seemed to solve a lot of stability problems. It's working great now and I'm much happier.