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Dear Highlanders, I would like to make an open apology here for the early morning's unthinking nuking of the original thread titled the same as this one. I was frustrated and aggravated with the way the project was going. It was after 4AM and I was giving up. I figured the thread was no longer relevant, and since no one other than myself had posted in it, I would just delete it. However, on my own boards I do not delete threads, ever. They are moved, made invisible to members, modified in some way, etc. They're never deleted outright. It feels like destruction to me to delete a thread on a board. Once it's gone, it's gone forever. Furthermore, on this board, which is not one of my boards, it is definitely wrong of me to delete a thread that once posted is part of the Scot's Newsletter Forums domain. So, I apologize for my preemptive strike on this thread earlier this morning. I will now endeavor to post a synopsis of what was originally posted in that thread. ____________________________________________ Here's the story... I was attempting to assemble a computer (Frankenputer) for my great-nephew Christian, who is 7 years old, from salvaged parts that I had dug up from the computer graveyard on the shelves and in the drawers of my shop. I was able to put together a little system that turned out as follows: Compaq Presario SR1417CL ASUS K8S-LA mobo AMD Sempron 3000+ 1.8Gig socket 754 CPU 768M RAM (slot 1 - 512M, slot 2 - 256M) SiS 760/964 chipset 60 Gig Samsung hdd Acer 15" CRT monitor Generic keyboard Generic mouse I had the Compaq, but needed to cannibalize another unit for the hard drive and the PSU (a 250W Bestec). The monitor is a brand new unit that my brother had in storage. It had never been taken out of the box before. I installed MS Windows XP/SP3 on the hdd, but was having issues with vid display, MS Security Essentials updates, and MS updates. Also, auto-updates were caught in some sort of loop that was driving a svchost.exe to run the CPU up to 100% and stay there. I've installed XP/SP3 bazillions of times, and I've never had this issue before. I have definitely never had an issue with MS Security Essentials before. So, I decided to install Linux for the kid. He doesn't know anything about operating systems one way or the other, anyway. He just knows Firefox and the little game (Flash stuff like Minesweeper, etc.) site where his mom signed him up an account. I figured Linux would be safer for a child to run on a system, anyway; less chance of malware, virii, etc. I installed Linux Mint 15 first. It was sluggish and graphic rendering was terrible... herky-jerkiness, poor frame rate, etc. I tried Zorin next. It wouldn't even startx. Then lastly, I tried Ubuntu. It ran fine as a Live OS, but once installed, displayed the same bad video issues. I wasn't even going to attempt to build my own drivers from the downloads at the SiS site, so I reinstalled Windows figuring I'd just work to resolve that operating system's issues. He'll really probably need MS Windows for school and other projects, anyway. I can always introduce him to GNU/Linux when he's a little older. This is where I am now: I've downloaded and installed the mobo chipset drivers directly from the SiS site. That helped a lot with USB, audio, and video issues. Now I'm still stuck on the MS updates and MS Security Essentials updates bugaboo. I'm sure they are related. There is a long, drawn out fix at MS that I will have to attempt next. I'm headed out to the shop in a few minutes to see if things will look a bit better after getting a bit of sleep. So, there you have it...