I decided to put together a budget computer for myself, and interestingly enough, the selections I made independently added up to almost exactly what was done for the first of the "System Builder Marathon" articles. Well...almost exactly. Instead of going with the Nvidia card used by the authors, I went with a Sapphire Radeon 1650 Pro.

Now, this article was very interesting to me when I read it a few days after I placed my orders because they describe a problem with the computer rebooting at post. I was very nervous reading this, but I figured I would hope for the best, given that there has been time for MSI to put together new Bios builds, or that the card I was ordering was slightly newer than the one used in the article, and thus wouldn't suffer this problem.

No such luck. The problem is intermittant, but definitely there. Sometimes it will make it past this point and allow me to install Windows XP. It even made it as far as installing off the CD drive, and now I'm at the point where the installation is running off the hard drive (i.e. it's not using that BSOD-esque primary installer off the CD). But I can't get past this point without the computer rebooting. Sometimes it won't make it past post for several iterations. Sometimes it will make it to the windows installation screen, and immediately reboot. Sometimes it will actually show some tantalizing text and scrolling bars...and then reboot. Needless to say, I'm pretty frustrated.

I've successfully flashed my bios to the newest revision from MSI (I believe it's 17) and there has been no change. My PSU is 600 watts and brand spanking new, I'm running an AMD X2 4600, a single gig stick of 800 mhz kingston ram, and of course that ATI 1650. I've unplugged just about everything else (except my western digital SATA drive), and the problem is still there.

Did anyone ever find out what the problem described in the articl;e was, because I'd really love to hear about it, so that maybe it can be killed.

Thanks for reading this, and thanks in advance for any advice.

I know this is a very short answer and probably not what you are looking for, but, return the board and get your money back. If you live in the UK then the board is not "fit for purpose" and breaches your statutory rights. Other countries should have similar legislation.

This point should be valid even if you have tried to "suffer" with the board for a while as it seems to be a known problem with the motherboard and you have extra rights for electronic purchases.

First try getting a refund from the retailer - it is them who you have a contract with. This should work but in the unlikely event this fails, go to the manufacturer.

What catalyst driver are you using? I was having horrid reboot problems with catalyst 7.3.

Catalyst? lol...I can't even get it to stay in windows for more than 2 minutes at a time. The installer hasn't even completed, as I said in my original post.