Advice on a PeeCee

[DethKnight]

I wouldn't pay 2.50 for an AMD K(anything)
I pitched my K6/2-380(working-somewhat) because of the ceaseless irritation it gave me. The K6/2-450 soon followed.
Never touch AMD voluntarily again.

I've had PBells die on the bench during the diagnostic stage.
That was before any tools touched the machine or any parts were disconnected.

Happily replaced it all with an ASUS 440BX-LE board from ebay (cost me $45us with postage and celeron 667)

PS: beep-codes are here
http://www.pchell.com/hardware/beepcodes.shtml

[DethKnight]

What kind of irritation?

Mainly crashing of software. Also th 3dnow/mmx issue at the time was still being sorted out.
But when I switched to the BX440/celeron , 99.8% of all the problems went away. (yes I retained all other parts in the xfer, vid-card,net-card,ram..etc) The remaining .2% I'd have to say were WinME related.

...Intel has its dark days...

won't dispute that , they may have returned, thus the dropping of prescott for Pentium M.

Such a setup would be considered matured

Aye, but its been going strong since the day I got it, its always powered on. runs Win2kpro/Slackware a.t.t. Neither of which have crashed yet.

[DethKnight]

I find it really annoying when

not that it matters now, and not that I care now, but it took several months of trying to fight thru the wierdness, (I was at the time an AMD fanboy). Im certain AMD chips are far better now, but I realise commodity PC hardware is cheap enough to pitch/recycle when there is a need for something different.

(the problems followed the chip to other mainboards)

If my current setup starts to flake out, I'll pitch/recycle and get a replacement.