Missed several week's posts because of the Chinese New Year + end of semester exam preparations + personal exams. Oh, and my PC decided to die on me in the most unceremonious way - it still works but all PCI-e slots are not working ... took me so long to figure that out. Luckily it fell back to its internal on-board GPU so at least it is currently still in a usable state with legacy unaccelerated graphics (on board only has a 7100nvidia GPU). Local service and support won't sell me the board on its own unless I bring it in and purchase with service fees so I have to look for alternatives. Seeing as it is a rather 'old' PC (CPU socket wise) its difficult to get good LGA775 motherboards anymore. Additionally, I realised further problems with buying a so-called branded PC ... the feature set found on this PC cannot be replicated on any commercial boards available for public purchase. Yeah, somehow Acer has designed this board with so many additional I/O options that if I buy an off-the-shelf motherboard, more that half of the PC's connectors won't work because they have nowhere to plugin into!
On its own, the mobo (which is an OEM MCP73) has 4 USB 2.0 + 1 IEE1394 ports on board. Then it has four (yup, 4) on board USB connectors to support the additional 4 USB ports on the casing top AND the card reader AND another USB port in front. Most boards only have 2 additional USB connectors. Additionally, the original board also has 1 additional IEEE1394 connector to the front firewire800 port. Looks like I have to scour ebay for refurbished boards else go without the ports. *sigh*
Other things that kept me busy was my new phone .... that will be for the next post.
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