One of the blights working in the Information Technology field is that commodity products and OEM manufatured computer systems can yield headaches and heartaches for IT employees. What are these pains that IT professionals deal with you might be asking yourself? The pain the IT community and its employees feels is the search for appropriate and correctly functioning software drivers for the hardware found in OEM manufactured computer systems.
For the most part, much of this problem has been mitigated by Microsoft and OEMs, both of which are doing better today at using quality components and testing drivers. But even today, well-known companies and products can challenge IT service personnel doing reinstallations or upgrades of operating systems. In the following situation, I will present one such scenario.
The ASUS A8R-MX/SI is an OEM packaged board for AMD processors. This capable board has AMD’s Socket 939 which supports the Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64, and Sempron processors. The 4 DIMM slots support up to 4GB of DDR memory and the board architecture supports dual-channel memory access. We received one of these motherboards in an OEM PC recently and were tasked with trying to install Vista and Windows XP Pro on the system.
Of course, the original CD with the drivers had long been lost, destroyed or thrown out in the garbage. What is a good IT serviceman to do in such a case? Use Google and search for the motherboard name of course. There are little if any useful results that can be gleaned from such a search which will point you directly to all the drivers necessary for a successful installation of Vista or XP. So, as an IT professional, you must do exhaustive searches for the various chipsets for components integrated on the motherboard. Here are some for our example case.
Since we have an ASUS motherboard, let’s start at asus.com.
However, when you search for this specific motherboard made by ASUS, you cannot find it in the list of products they support. (see photo) Remember we are looking for ASUS A8R-MX/SI. Our closes match is ASUS A8R-MVP. However, if you download these drivers, they fail to work for our motherboard in most cases.
Searching a bit on Google will give you some clues that ASUS does acknowledge the motherboard’s existence.
One forum posting asks the all important question — “Where can I find Windows Vista drivers?” Good question! This post and its answer results in a circular argument as it points back to the ASUS motherboard selection menus. There are also some generic links to Vista drivers for common components, but they are not correct for our A8R-MX board.
Continuing through the Google search results will finally bring you to the conclusion that ASUS does not support the motherboard. What?! So a call to ASUS is in order and what do we find out. They list the drivers and BIOS updates for this motherboard under the Vintage-AH1 barebone bundle. Sweet Pain! Let’s move over to a website that can give us the drivers for the Vintage-AH1 motherboard.
Most of these drivers will work, but not all of them function in Vista. So you are left with compatible drivers for Windows XP Pro. The IT serviceman is so happy it took this long to figure out that Vista was going to be bust on this motherboard. I guess it’s the hazards of working with OEM PCs and motherboard. Ah, but saving money on this computer was important to the customer. <grin> You get what you pay for in this world!
The solution to IT service woes in drivers and OEM parts and components is not an easy one. If you value your time and sanity, I suggest avoiding servicing OEM machines and do not buy the components unless you have the time and patience to make things work for you.
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