Maybe I've just been unlucky. Or maybe the little bit of Italian in me causes me to hold a grudge for a long, long, looooong time. Or maybe I was just too much of a noob before, though I've been pretty savvy for a few years now. I do learn a little more with each upgrade.
Seriously, I've had four VIA motherboards, and I'll bet I've spent 100 cumulative hours just getting them set up to work with everything. I've had two VIA boards I've had to return to the vendors because of their inability to post, one an ABIT and the other an ASUS. To be fair, those instances may not have been VIA's fault, and once I've gotten them set up, they usually are fairly stable thereafter, like the SOYO Dragon Plus I'm running now. However, it does seem like installing any sort of new hardware is doomed to become an adventure. I think it really hit home for me how easy it can be when I bought my Athlon 1400 a couple years ago and an ECS Motherboard with the SiS 635 chipset. I plugged everything in, turned it on, made my BIOS settings, intalled my OS, and everything worked! The FIRST time! Only minor tweaking was necessary and I was on my way.
Then AMD came out with the XP, and the KT266A was the fastest thing on the block, so I found myself buying a VIA board again. And if their next release blows away the nForce2 and I decide to keep buying Athlons, I will probably buy VIA again. I still reserve the right to dislike them though.
It is better now than it used to be. Remember when VIA had to rewrite their 4-1 drivers for the AGP mini-port, because it was running at about half speed? Remember the *terrific* IDE performance? Ahhh, those were the good old days. (As in, good that their gone.)
I want to move to space, so I can overclock processors cooled to absolute zero.