Well, well.  I installed a very beta Vista application I used to use, and low and behold – it goofed up my system something fierce. Unfortunately, uninstalling left buckets of configuration problems that I could fiddle with for hours, or in the same time just backup and re-install. I chose option 2. But something strange happened. When I tried to run the install DVD again, it took 5-10 minutes between each dialog box – mouse was slow, screen repaints were painfully visible, etc. Everything was going at a horrible snails pace. What happened?! I did my last install in like 20 minutes.

I methodically unplug all my devices until I get back down to the bare system board (no effect), then on a whim I take 2 gigs out – since I’d recently upgraded from 2 to 4 gigs of ram.  Maybe those were bad sticks of memory. Voila – super-fast again. Huh? I try different combinations of the sticks, and the same result. It’s not bad ram, it’s the fact there is 4gigs total ram. I start looking on forums and sure enough, other people are having similar problems. Seems there are various motherboards that are having this problem when they upgrade from 2 to 4gigs, or in some cases, 4 to 8gigs. Extremely slow system responses, etc but pull the memory out and it works like a champ. I downloaded the latest bios and flashed it, but it didn’t fix the problem. Guess I’ll have to wait or order another motherboard. This isn’t a huge problem as 2 gigs has been more than adequate for everything I’ve been doing so far; but now I have 2 extra gigs of really nice DDR2 800mhz ram sitting around waiting for a bios patch. Bogus. For the record it’s a DG965OTMKR motherboard (which I really love b/c of it’s built in SATA raid, etc)