Manual Labour

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I suspect that Gigabyte knew full well what it was doing with the GA-7NNXP as most of us never push a motherboard to the limits. Heck, I recall Pentium 2 and Pentium III motherboards that boasted support for ‘up to’ 1.5GB of memory at a time when a 128MB memory module was impressively large, and it wasn’t until the year 2001 that it was obvious that Windows 9x only supports up to 512MB of memory.

It would be wildly unrealistic of me to expect Gigabyte and all of the other motherboard manufacturers to test every permutation of processor, memory and graphics card with each and every new model of motherboard, and even if this were economically viable the manual would be out of date before the motherboard left the factory. Happily there are plenty of other ways that motherboard manufacturers could make our lives easier, but there is little evidence that the manufacturers attach much importance to usability, documentation and manuals, and that’s mainly because we end users don’t make enough fuss about the subject.

Unfortunately part of the reason for this omission is that it’s standard practice for reviewers to score hardware on Performance while we rate software for Ease of Use. In other words there’s no real incentive for hardware manufacturers to spend time and money making their products user-friendly as it rarely gets a mention in most reviews. In addition there’s the old adage that if you need to refer to the manual it’s technology and if you don’t need the manual it’s a consumer product, so in many ways we have come to expect a hard time when we set up a new product. Well I don’t enjoy it one little bit.

I hate the idea that a processor may fit in to the socket on a motherboard but the PC won’t start up without a BIOS update, which I can’t perform because the PC won’t start up. On which subject, I admire the clever way that companies such as Gigabyte have a BIOS flashing utility built into the BIOS so you just feed in a floppy with the appropriate BIN file, but I far prefer the Windows approach that Intel pioneered as soon as Windows XP was launched.

Intel was the first manufacturer to offer the ability to flash the BIOS from within Windows, rather than grubbing around at a DOS prompt but it still fails to label up the front panel header pins so you can connect the power and reset buttons quickly and easily. As I write this I’m looking at an Intel D925XCV board and the pins are colour coded, so it would have been simple to add legends for PWR and RST, but it hasn’t bothered.

In recent times I have suffered agonies trying to connect up SATA hard drives both as a single drive and in RAID arrays because the manufacturers don’t colour code the connectors and the manual makes no mention of which SATA connector is controlled by the chipset and which ports hang off the RAID chip. Added to that you often have to run the driver CD to build a driver floppy ready for when the Windows installation demands that you press f6, and it infuriates me that you need one driver for a single SATA drive and another for a RAID array.

Motherboards that have an additional RAID controller usually come with a separate manual that covers the RAID function, but it is my experience that neither part of the manual will be of much help. It would be wrong to mock the Pacific Rim English that is such a feature of many of these manuals as the Taiwanese manage in English while I am all at sea in Mandarin.

If you can make it through the Windows installation process first time, every time, then you’re doing it in spite of the manual, rather than because of it.

There’s no escaping the fact that the best tool you can have when you build a new PC is another (functioning) PC with a broadband Internet connection, but once your new PC is up and running, I like MSI’s Live Update utility which is clearly modelled on Windows Update and scans your PC for BIOS and driver updates. The effect is rather spoilt by the standard warning that you shouldn’t update your BIOS if your PC is functioning correctly, but at least it means well.

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