The link that Quartz gave seems pretty much like the one I was looking at. Scroll down to the ‘second issue’ part and it talks about AMD conflicts.
It borked my computer, which has an AMD CPU, but isn’t from HP or ASUS. It trashed the filesystems in the process. I had to wipe the disks and reinstall from scratch.
I think it’s a marketing ploy.
See, if your XP doesn’t work at all, Vista looks . . . well, not so bad. Or maybe not horrible. Or, inevitable. Or something.
Tris
put down the sabre, this is hard to read as anything other than trying to bait someone into an argument, i.e. trolling. This is a warning to knock it off.
Um, I read pdts’s post as a joke, not a troll. Is your trigger finger a bit itchy this morning, Giraffe?
Guilty as charged! Sorry about that.
My only problem with SP3 is that I can’t use my custom XP skins anymore.
Re-reading my comment, it came off as much more dickish than I intended. Sorry about that, Darkhold, and I’m sorry that you’re having computer issues.
More substantively, you asked:
According to both your description and the link posted by Quartz, there seems to be some issue on the A8N32-SLI with the USB. I don’t have an answer for why it happens – it seems it’ll be posted on this Jesper guy’s blog if and when it’s discovered. However, we know that a system has to check all the USB connections at startup to find/load drivers for the connected plug’n’play devices.
My guess is that Asus is returning an unexpected value during that check – it could be any number of things (note: made up examples follow), something like a “-1” rather than a “0” if no devices are found. Or, it could be that the timing involved is off – for instance, finding a USB mouse causes an immediate attempt to load the driver, even though the USB subsystem isn’t fully initialized. Or, since it seems to be ACPI related, it could be something as obscure as a sleep/hibernate issue. Having one device connected that successfully initalizes might be enough to avoid the issue. Combined with the Windows setting “Reboot on load failure”, you’d get the problems described.
As I said, I don’t have an answer. I’d be very interested in knowing exactly what the problem is…but I suspect it’s Asus’s fault.
No, I’m pretty sure jokes are supposed to be funny.
If my .02 means anything I read it as a joke as well.
Flash drives may be allowing you to sidestep an error involving booting to USB. I am not a BIOS programmer (do we have one of those here) but motherboards are very complex devices. Although common I am hardly shocked that they missed one series of boards. Also the A8n series has a long line of boards going back around 5 years or so now…An A8N of 5 years ago may have problems a newer A8N board may not suffer from
In which case, a lot of us are in trouble.
Sorry for your computer troubles. It’s got to be one of the most frustrating things in the world. But…
…since I’m not the first person: Damn am I glad I finally switched to Mac.
<smug fangirl gloating>Know what else rocks about Mac? When it detects the rare update that requires rebooting, it asks: Would you like to install and reboot now? And if you click no, it stops asking you. No more of that every 90 seconds crap.</sfg>
I sometimes wonder whether some people who switch to Mac and get all smug about how great it is just didn’t know how to use Windows, because this is yet another example of a Mac “benefit” that can easily be applied to Windows.
All it requires is clicking a single button to set Automatic Updates to “Notify me but don’t automatically download or install them.”
That way, when updates are detected, Windows asks if you want to download them, and only downloads the ones you select. The details for each update also tell you which ones may require restarting your computer. Furthermore, if you deselect one of the updates, Windows also gives you an option that says “Don’t warn me again about this update.”
Exactly, Darkhold has learned the hard lesson of,
The 3 Laws of Microsoft Operating Systems
1 Don’t adopt a new Windows operating system until at least service pack 2.
1a* The only good, stable, Window OS is one that Microsoft no longer supports.
2 Don’t install service pack #X until after the service pack #X bug fixes are all released
2a* You’ll know this has happened when they roll out service pack #Y.
3 Fuck you Bill Gates.
3a* Hi Vista!CMC +fnord!
- See they can’t even get the three laws right!
Ok, but I’ll have my Macbook Pro with me at the Thunderdome. 
Yeah, my ass. I switched to Linux after getting fed up with Windows XP. I cannot get a reliable internet connection despite having one of the most compatible wireless dongles available. Firefox routinely crashes the GUI. PDFs routinely crash the GUI. I’ve had to restart Linux more often than I ever did XP. Right now I’m typing this on my Win2k laptop because I’m afeared to use the Linux box for general work.
So no, you’re not the only one with computer issues this weekend, Darkhold.
Tried using ndiswrapper and the windows drivers instead?
… also, are you sure your ram is okay? That sounds like dodgy ram symptoms to me.
I laughed. Do jokes have to pass a moderator quality control test?
Fair enough. I’ll concede that I could have simply misread his post. Unless there are instance of trolling or borderline trolling in the near future, I’ll assume I was wrong and retract the warning.