Hello, This PC is our old one we bought new late winter of 2000. It is a Pionex P.O.S. that we had trouble with from day one. It froze all the time. Then one day it just died. So it sat around for ever till I tried to fix it. But not knowing what I was doing I probaly did more harm than good. So I ended up replacing the M5ALA ver 1.2 board with a M5ALA ver2, went from a K6-2 400 to a K6-2 500 cpu, [I have a extra K6-2 500 if anyone is looking for one, I would have to install it to make sure it works], I also have a Cyrix MII-333GP, 83mhz, bus 3X, 2.9 volt CPU that came in used board, it works but don't know much about this CPU, like is it a better CPU than the K6-2? I will sell it to if anyone is interested. It had 2 sticks of 32 pc100 dimm, It now has 2 64 pc100 and a 32 100pc sticks of dimm. It came with a Quantum bigfoot HDD but don't remember the size, 4 to 6 gig area I think it was, It now has a 12 gig quantum bigfoot as primary HDD and a 6 gig bigfoot as storage HDD. It came with a Intel 740 [apollo 7400] vid card, [still original one] and a ES 1869 sound card,[also original]. I did a complete new windows 98 install and then did the service pac deal and all critical updates and I was still having freeze up problems like when it was new, I also noticed that it smelled and felt hot inside when ever I would open it up so I put a fan from a old power supply in the front of case blowing up and back at CPU and power supply and took a extra CPU fan and aimed it at plug in boards, plus it has big fan in right side of case near front, a CPU fan, and big fan in power supply, after adding the 2 more fans it stopped freezing up even with movable screen savers with sounds which always froze the thing up. I also have a very old packard bell pc with small celeron CPU and only 64 ram dimm 3 gig hard drive but the same games worked on it, it also has win98 installed from same disk, just slow and many game options didn't work but never froze. So I figured they would work much better on this heap but after games start and intro is done and game setup comes up it freezes up tight, nothing works. On the back of the drag race game it says win95 with directX7.0a, pentium 133 with standard 3D card, 32 MB RAM, 2X CD ROM drive, and DirectX 7.0a compatible sound. I also have a ES 1869 sound card in the old packard bell because the onboard sound does not work. [The old Pahkard Bell does have a 20X CD ROM, I don't know the speed of the CD ROM in the PIONEX it says NEC CD ROM :282 on boot up] I don't understand why games would work on that old little slow packard bell but not on this PC? I was told by someone on this site that the M5ALA board is not stable at 100 speed but with extra fans it has been working way better than new eccept for games. Wifes friend had rollercoaster game on here while I was gone drag racing and she said it worked fine. It don't make any sence to me. Last I looked I still have like 77% free space on here. I have tried to update vid driver but always says has best driver already installed. I am still slow on some things, so I need to ask about the flash for the vid card, what does that mean and how do I check? Sorry if dumb question seems the more I learn the more I find I don't know. Thanks every one for the help on this site, I have learned alot from it. I am having fun though learning this stuff even though it is working with old outdated stuff, at least parts are cheap on ebay LOL. I was reading about some kind of stuff you put on the CPU to help transfer heat to heat sink, but so far out of the 3 mother boards I have delt with [all M5ALAs] none has had any stuff on the CPU/heatsink, could this be part of the game problem? Or another dumb question? I should have just junked this thing but we payed a ton for it when new and in 4 years its a antique lol. [plus the more I fought with it to get it running again the more I said I will make it work again [within reason cost wise] thanks to ebay it runs again for about a $100 total. [Sorry for the book lenth responce] TomW
