Abit NF7-S question

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E4g1e

Supreme [H]ardness
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May 21, 2002
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I have an Abit NF7-S V2.0 motherboard. But I don't have any Serial ATA devices at all - at least not yet. So, if I have only Parallel ATA (IDE) devices, should I disable the Serial ATA controller and connect all of my devices to the regular IDE ports? Or should I use the Serillel2 adapter on my primary IDE hard drive?

By the way, I am running my system with the Serillel2 adapter connected to my Western Digital WD1200JB hard drive. But my system often crashed while I was surfing the Internet with the latest Serial ATA driver available from Abit - whose build date is much older than the updated Silicon Image driver from Microsoft's Windows Update site. So I downloaded and installed the Microsoft driver update - and so far, so good.

Any suggestions?

Feel free to comment or give recommendations,
E4g1e
 
There is no loss or gain performance wise when using the adapter so it is really up to you. Just a matter of preference, the only real advantages of using the adapter is less of a clutter in your case, and if you have lots of other HD's/CD-ROM's. Boot up also takes a split second slower with SATA enabled from my experience. If you were having system crashes though I would just use the IDE ports, even if it does seem stable with the updated drivers.
 
It turned out that my crashes were due to having (one) too many programs running within the Windows taskbar. I set up one of those programs not to run at Windows startup (the way I used to have set up), and now the stability improved greatly.

By the way, my NF7-S V2.0 came with BIOS version 19, which I had immediately updated to BIOS version 20 (I've read that the BIOS version 21 has a buggy Serial ATA BIOS, so I avoided that BIOS version). I'm also using version 2.45 of the nForce drivers (though I also have version 3.13 backed up on CD-RW).
 
From what I have seen BIOS 21 only messes up those with SATA+RAID.
 
Thanks for your suggestions.

My system is running stable now. It turned out that one of the programs that used to reside in the Windows taskbar - Money Express, from Microsoft Money 2004 - is the main cause of my initial stability problems. I then set Money up so that Money Express doesn't get loaded into the Windows taskbar when Windows XP boots up. (I had it disabled before on my previous systems anyway, since I don't need to be reminded while I'm trying to do something else on the computer.)

Thus, in my case, then it's the software that caused my BSOD problems initially.
 
I'm still getting blue screens, even when my main hard drive is connected to the native IDE port. Moreover, leaving the NumLock turned on in Windows can introduce instabilities (NumLock is turned off by default when Windows XP actually starts, even if NumLock had been turned on in the BIOS).

So, I'll switch the NumLock on only on programs that actually require it - and turn the NumLock off at all other times.

Another possibility is the graphics card, being an older 4X AGP (only AGP 2.0-compliant) card with that Ti 4400, sucking up too much power from the motherboard. My PSU should be able to handle that load, but the motherboard may not. In this case, then, I'll look for a good AGP 3.0-compliant GFX card.
 
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