GA-7N400-L sound card gameport and F8 BIOS issues

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.gigabyte (More info?)

It looked like I had put together a nice upgrade for my second machine,
but in doing some routine testing, I have come across a couple of issues.

I have a dual boot between Windows ME and Windows 2000 set up. All
drivers for all of my hardware are up to date and DirectX 9.0b is
installed under both OS's. I decided to go with my Hercules Fortissimo
III 7.1 sound card for this upgrade. I made sure that the onboard sound
was completely disabled, along with the game and MIDI ports. My Microsoft
Sidewinder gameport gamepad works 100% under Windows 2000 when plugged
into the Fortissimo III. However, no matter what I did, I could not get
the gamepad to work under Windows ME, even though there are no conflicts
or anything. I tried different port configurations and even moving the
sound card to a different PCI slot. Nothing worked.

I then decided to update my F6 BIOS to the F8 BIOS going through proper
BIOS update proceedures. After updating from F6 to F8, I powered down
after the update, powered up again after 30 seconds, reset the BIOS to
default settings, saved and exited, then went back in and set it up
properly.

Now, not only does the problem with the gameport on the Fortissimo III
under Windows ME still exist, but now my Maxtor 80GB ATA-133 hard drive
which was working perfectly in DMA 6 mode with the F6 BIOS is now running
in DMA 2 mode! It's noticeably slower. Of course, I can override this in
Windows 2000 using nVidia's nForce2 ATA controller, but not in Windows ME.
There are no other drives connected to the primary IDE controller, but
both of my optical drives on the secondary controller are ATA-33.

I have e-mailed Gigabyte about this, but I wanted to pass this along to
the group for your info, and also in hopes that someone may have some
insight to these problems. Thanks.