I HATE my computer!!!

[Christopher Henderson]

Arg!  I'm never going to buy AMD again....and I hate having to say that 'cause I love rooting for the under dog - part of the reason why I love Linux so much - but geezus fucking kriest is my system ever unstable! I have a dual Athlon mobo and under every o.s. I've tried (Linux (2.2 and 2.4 series kernels) FreeBSD (4.x) and Windows (2K and XP) I get crashes.  I've updated the damned bios, I've looked every where and come to the conclusion that I'm not the only one.  Its my damned chipset apparently.  Windows is more or less fine unless I try to run some SMP enabled software or games - then it locks up.  FreeBSD is fine unless I run a kernel compiled for SMP - then it locks up after a few minutes, else it runs dandy for hours.  Linux....my favorite o.s. cannot be my main o.s. on this hardware.  Its just not stable - I've looked and added the mem=nopentium tag and I cannot start X-Windows.  So then I remove it and try the noapic tag and it makes no difference. Perhaps I'm adding the tag wrong?  I dunno - but my next motherboard will be dual-Xeons.  More expensive?  Sure, but hopefully more reliable too.   I know a fellow who works at the Oklahoma University weather forecasting center where they use two Linux clusters.  The older one (maybe a year) is all dual athlon like mine - he says they regret the purchase, all the machines have to be reboot periodically to insure stability.  The new cluster is all dual Xeons - been going months now without any downtime.  Both run Red Hat Linux  :-)  I dislike Intel, their often worse behaving then Microsoft....but I cannot live like this.  I spend a large chunk of my day in front of a box for work or news or play and this is driving me nuts.  I hate having to sit in Windows much of the time but until I replace my computer I'm stuck.   So I guess this email is part rant/part question - if anyone has a simular motherboard (760MP chipset from Tyan, not the newer 760MPX) and has a solution by all means let me know.  I'll love you forever.  Thankfully I've landed a great new job at Lockheed Martin and with the increase in pay over my old position I can stand to buy a new box.  My first home-built computer was dual Celerons and I've since become hooked on SMP, I'll never build/buy a UP box again unless its a laptop or a collectors comp like my Sun workstation.  Having an always responsive box is a nice luxury.  Even with something large processing in the background I always have an idle CPU.  Coupled with more then one SCSI hard disk and I'm set.  Am I the only one who spends his spending money on his computer but drives an old clunker car?  So I'm a geek...   Thnx for reading this is anyone ever does - it is long. ~Christopher