2nd K8N SLi Platinum motherboard just died

Question

Hope somebody else has experienced this - now on my 3rd board. A bit about my system:
Msi K8N SLi Platinum motherboard
2 x Seagate Barracuda ST3200822AS 200Gb Hard disk
Antec PSU True Blue 480w
1 x AMD (Winchester) Athlon 64bit 3200+ CPU
OCZ Dual Channel Kit 2x512MB DDR400 Ram
128MB Gigabyte GV NX66T128VP Graphics Card
Running MCE 2005
I built my first system running Media Center 2005 a few months back. Very stable. Used to put it into S3 sleep mode each evening and wake up the next day. Never any problems. CPU temp ran about 47degC. Never did anything stressful on it, no games just watched tv with a tuner card and played mp3s.
One day it wouldn't wake up, wouldn't post, no beeps nothing. cpu fan spun briefly (2 secs) and died. I stripped it down to bare essentials (1 stick ram, cpu). Tested PSU - fine. Tried out of case, again no joy, so I RMAed. Put it down to a bad board.
So I installed the new board - it worked fine. Must have been a bad board. Great! It ran for another month and the same thing happened, it just would wake up one day! Now I'm worried, am I doing something wrong with these boards, are they getting too hot? How come they fail when they are switched off? Is it a bios thing? - I tried resetting the Cmos, no joy there.
Any way that I can update the bios when they are in this state?
Any ideas - cheers Richard

Answer 1

richardwilshire...here is a list of many potential non-compliant APM features you may want to look at, and note that these are carry-overs from Windows 2000, the foundation of WinXP:
Key APM Components and What They Do
APM BIOS: Placed in ROM or flash by the OEM. Does most of the real work of powering the system on and off. The operating system can call the BIOS, and it either works or it doesn't; its operation is opaque to the operating system. The APM BIOS must be turned on using the BIOS setup utility for APM to work. If the APM BIOS is unstable, it may be necessary to turn the APM BIOS off using the BIOS setup utility, in addition to turning off Windows 2000 APM support. The APM BIOS should be configured such that timeouts are either turned off or set for the longest period possible, so that the operating system can control timeouts instead of the APM BIOS.
Ntdetect.com: It detects whether the APM BIOS is present before booting the operating system, determines whether Windows 2000 can use it, and reports the results of detection in the registry.
NtLdr: Restarts APM upon resume from hibernate, if APM was active before hibernation.
Ntapm.sys: A Windows 2000 driver that hooks the system and the APM BIOS together. It includes certain system operations for dispatch to the APM BIOS, and it polls APM BIOS events and status. Note than when the APM BIOS presents an event (such as suspend or power off), Ntapm.sys catches this, and then issues an NtInitiatePowerAction call, which tells the operating system to respond appropriately. At the end, the Windows 2000 power manager calls into the HAL, which calls back into Ntapm.sys, which calls the APM BIOS. In this process, almost all operating system and driver power code is the same between APM and ACPI.
Hal.dll: Windows 2000 APM support works only with Halx86, which is the only HAL to have the hooks needed to call into Ntapm.sys. It's also the only HAL relevant to important APM machines in the market.
Apmbatt.sys: This emulates a battery unit so the system battery status code can work.
Power Applet: The Control Panel applet that allows the user to enable or disable APM support on a computer. This is the only supported way to turn operating system APM support on or off.
Biosinfo.inf: Windows 2000 file that lists machines on the Autoenable APM list and the Disable APM list, and also lists the BIOS detection sequences used to match them.
Key Elements in the Registry
Ntdetect Reporting. The data about APM that is discovered by Ntdetect.com is reported in the registry using a Multi-function adapter (MFA) entry in the system description of the hardware tree. To find this, look in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ hardware\ description\ system\ multifunctionadapter.
There will be a set of keys there named 0, 1, 2, 3, etc. Each of them will have value entries named Component Information, Configuration Data, Identifier, and so on. Find the key whose Identifier entry == "APM". The "Configuration Data" entry of that key will contain the data on APM found and reported by Ntdetect.com. If the key is absent, then APM was not found. The contents of this value entry are reported in sdk\inc\ntapmsdk.h.
Running Apmstat.exe -v will dump this structure, for machines where it's relevant. For machines where it's not relevant (multiprocessors, not x86, not halx86, ACPI is on, and so on), Apmstat.exe will report that.
Biosinfo vs. Machine-Specific Info. The results of machine-specific detection versus Biosinfo.inf are stored in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ System\ CurrentControlSet\ Control\ BIOSInfo\ APM. If the "Attributes" value is 1, the machine's APM BIOS is "known good" and the machine is on the Autoenable APM list. If the value 2, the machine's APM BIOS is "known bad" and the machine is on the Disable APM list. Otherwise, the machine is neutral.
Running apmstat will report whether the APM BIOS is known to be good, known to be bad, or is neutral.
HAL Reporting. If the HAL is Halx86.dll, the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ System\ CurrentControlSet\ Control\ ApmLegalHal will have a value entry present with data of 1.
Running apmstat will report if this is not the case.
ACPI Reporting. If the machine is an ACPI machine, there will be a services entry for ACPI under (HKLM\System\currentcontrolset\services\ACPI) with value Start == 0. This is telling the system to load and run Acpi.sys at phase 0. If this is not present, the machine is not being run as an ACPI machine, even if, perhaps, it should be.
Running apmstat will report a machine as an ACPI machine if it sees Acpi.sys has Start == 0.
UI Elements
Power Applet APM Tab. The Control Panel includes a Power applet. If the APM is installed at all (enabled or disabled), there will be an APM tab in this applet. You can turn APM on and off by checking the box in this tab. This is the only recommended and supported way to do that. Turning APM on is an on-the-fly Plug and Play action; turning it off requires a reboot. If the tab is absent, it's an ACPI machine, an APM Disabled machine, or the machine simply doesn't have APM.
Standby on Shutdown Menu. If APM is turned on, there will be a Standby entry under the Shutdown option when the user presses CTRL+ALT+DEL. There may also be a Hibernate entry, which is a separate function. (Hibernate can work even if neither APM nor ACPI are present.) Standby under APM has the same use as under ACPI.
Battery Status Icon. If the battery display is turned on in the Control Panel Power applet, there will be a Battery Status icon on the system tray, which works about the same as for ACPI. Note that an APM machine always reports a single composite battery, regardless of how many are present or what the machine reports. (Windows 2000 uses the unified/composite number, because this is thought to be more reliable on a wide range of APM BIOSes, and is simpler.)
Power Button. On most APM machines, the power button, a sleep button, or the like, can suspend the machine (place on standby). Most require the power button to resume, though at least one will come back with a keyboard touch. Windows 2000 APM does not support custom power buttons.
Tools
Apmstat.exe: As of Windows 2000 RC1, Apmstat.exe is included in the support directory on the Windows 2000 product CD. Support personnel and expert users can run this utility to determine status.
BIOS Setup Utility. Essentially all APM machines will have some sort of machine setup/configuration screen, usually accessed at boot by pressing ESC, DEL, F1, F2, or F10. Support personnel and expert users may be able to improve system behavior by changing or disabling APM options.
Note: Be warned that some APM BIOSes will turn themselves off if all timers are disabled. In this case, it's best to set all timers to some long timeout value.
APM BIOS and Kernel Debugger. Some APM BIOSes will refuse to suspend if the kernel debugger is active on one of the system COM ports.
Event log. If an APM_SETPOWER call fails (that is, a standby/suspend fails at the APM BIOS interface), then Ntapm.sys will write a record into the system event log, with data reporting that this happened and whatever error code the APM BIOS returned. This information is sometimes useful if a machine is refusing to suspend because of activity on some port that isn't obvious to the user.
NOTES:
• APM support is not allowed on server products. This means that the APM tab will not appear and that there is no APM support in Windows 2000 Advanced Server or in Windows 2000 Datacenter.
• APM will not hook up the standby vector on machines that do not have batteries. This means that on machines that do not have batteries, standby will not appear as an option on the Shutdown list, and will not be available as an operation.
• Hibernate is independent of APM or ACPI; hibernate can be used on machines that do not have either APM or ACPI.
• To get the battery status icon, you must turn it on with the Power applet in the control panel.
• To get hibernate, you must turn it on with the Power applet in the control panel.
Suggestions for Problem Resolution
The following provides guidelines for support personnel or expert users who are troubleshooting APM support on a system running Windows 2000.
1.
 Make sure the user has APM turned on, hibernate turned on, and the battery icon turned on.
2.
 Make sure that APM BIOS screen blanking is turned off. This will often make the system seem to behave badly when problem is only that the screen is black. (Use a screen saver of BLANK to get the right effect.)
3.
 Run Apmstat.exe. Its output will often make the issue obvious (trying to run APM on a multiple-processor machine, for example).
4.
If the machine is a desktop, it will rarely run APM well, but you can get 90 percent of the value by using hibernate, which does not require either APM or ACPI to work.
5. If Windows 2000 APM has been turned off, and the machine is still not stable, try turning off the APM BIOS itself in the machine's setup     screen.
6.
 Some machines will work better with Windows 2000 APM turned on, because this puts the operating system more in sync with the system's APM BIOS.