Thanks Speedo.
Well, I'm finally up and running again - this time MUCH more stably (if that is even a word?). I took back the ECS motherboard and P4 (I had to return both of them together as they were bought as a single CPU/mobo combo)
Anyway, I bought a 2.0Ghz Celeron and an Albatron PX845E Pro II for less than the P4/ECS combo. I LIKE that Albatron motherboard. I didn't even realize until I brought it home that it even comes with RAID...
So, the saga continues...
I brought it home, boot it up fine, but it won't remain stable. Wondering what is going on, I enable the detailed POST tests and, sure enough, even though it was "seeing" all 256MB of my DDR module, after it counts through about 130MB of it the motherboard said that the test failed (it also, LITERALLY said to me that "There may be a problem with the memory" or something to that effect - cool). Anyway, I figure, that explains the flakiness of my memory in the ECS motherboard.
So I look in the documentation that comes with the Albatron, and I swear that it said that it would take ECC registered DDR memory, so I go BACK to Fry's for a second time in the same day (I live about 35 minutes from it - one way) and buy a single 256Mb of Corsair ECC reg unbuffered memory. Take it home, fire it up, and it won't even boot. After playing around with it, I figure that either I was given the wrong RAM (doubtful, but possible), the newly purchased memory is defective, or the documentation is wrong and/or I just misunderstood it.
Not wanting to venture a third trip out to Fry's, this time I went to a Best Buy's that is a lot closer and bought a single stick of nonECC unbuffered Kingston memory (for a steal too - including a $25 mail in rebate, it is only like $44 :winkgrin: ).
This time, fired up the system and it comes up fine without any problems - including passing the extended POST tests with no problems of any kind.
I think I'll run on this for a few days and probably pick up another stick of 256MB Kingston RAM so I'll be at 512Mb.
I miss the onboard 512Kb of cache from that first P4 I had, but oh well, I mostly game on this machine and I think it should do nicely for me... if not, then I'll take it back and get a regular P4 with more cache on it...
See ya!
Sloan