I recently upgraded my office PC… Just a GA-K8VM800M (rev 2.0) mobo, 512MB of 400Mhz RAM, and a sempron 2800+ CPU.

Installation went very well, but after a while, the PC would lock up… After some experiments, I found the motherboard BIOS options to be very limited… when booting up, I got a message saying that SMARTwas disabled… but couln’t find anywhere in the bios that would allow me to switch it on!

I eventually discovered that while in the BIOSsetup screens, pressing CTRL-F1 enables some extra hidden menus!

Ah, good, I can now enable SMART. 

With some help from http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.aspx?catid=23&threadid=67494&enterthread=y , I found the onboard video needed some adjusting (ie change AGP from 8X to 4X, etc).

After that, the PC worked much better… but still felt sluggish while windows was starting and logging in.

I could reliably cause the PC to crash within a few minutes, by running my OpenGL3D screensaver (“beam“… BTW: an excellent screensaver…)

Before the PClockup, the 3D screensaver would be impressively quick. I looked at updating the BIOS, but it was already at the latest (R2-FD)

So after adjusting down many settings (and noticeably slowing down the PC)… the PC would still lock up. I decided to install an AGP video card (just a geforce4 MX4000), and adjusting all the BIOS parameters back to their optimal settings.

After that, the mobois rock solid… I just wish the onboard video would have worked better… it was as good (if not better than my GeForce 5500 card).