I got a call yesterday from a friend of mine, who had just finished building a home brew system, and was experiencing a few issues with the system. First there was the issue of a boot menu. Seems that at each boot, you had to select which drive you wished to boot from. Than there was an issue of not being able to get into safemode. System lock up and freezes, email issues, and a few other misc. things that were also happening. But what caught my attention was that he had bought a motherboard at a computer fair for $40.00 that I believe he stated was a AUSA brand. Which seemed maybe that it was a play on the word Asus, a reputable motherboard company.

This morning I tried to locate such a brand on the Internet which turned up nothing. So my guess is that this maybe a junker board that he got. So I went out to Newegg and found a genuine Asus mobo with a AMD x2 4200 cpu combo on sale for just $88. Found 1G Kingston memory on sale for $24, Seagate 160G Sata HD for $55, Lite-ON DVD burner for $28 & a Rosewll 350 watt case for $26. With tax and license about $250 out the door.

What is important is that these are name brand components and not ‘happy-harry’ makes with no online support.

My point is be careful what you buy out there in computer land. Stick with name brand stuff and you will be a lot better off in the long run. Generic may be OK for your pharmaceutical prescriptions, but may not amke it when you are building a system.

Comments welcome.

[tags]parts, cheap, name brand, asus, amd, seagate, kingston, lite-on, [/tags]