Written by Risharde Ramnath inclusively for TriniNation.com

It all started about a month ago when my g/f called me up and told me that her machine (computer) was freezing while she went on the internet (dialup internet that is). Basically, the machine would freeze up after 5-10 minutes of internet usage and the monitor would show a blurry "gibberish" of rectangular looking objects.

My first guess what that some hardware was either defective like the old PCI card we put back into the machine so I took that out... this didn't help. I even began to think it was the modem since the modem would take forever to disconnect from the internet and during which, the same "freeze" would occur. This had me totally frustrated and I even took out the modem and it STILL would freeze (just less often / less frequently). I tried another modem, that didn't help either. So I thought it was Vista or some application/virus that could have been causing it, and guess what... NO.. it wasn't vista since I ended up installing Windows XP and the problem still occurred.

Totally frustrated and beginning to believe that we bought a "bad buy" motherboard (since the ECS motherboard is cheap) or a bad computer altogether, I went to ECS's website at http://www.ecs.com.tw and looked up the specific motherboard which is in this case the : ECS 6100 PM-M2 Version 2.0 motherboard which supports AM2+ processors and downloaded all the drivers. Updated the drivers and STILL, the darn thing kept freezing with the funny looking rectangles on the screen.

Finally, after deciding that it could just be the motherboard, I decided to last but not least to "Flash the BIOS" on the motherboard. I downloaded the latest BIOS update, crossed my fingers and hit the enter button. Guess what?! THAT WORKED! After flashing the BIOS on the motherboard, it stopped freezing! So if you have been fighting up with an ECS board like that one we bought, its probably best to skip all the processes and just flash the darn thing.

I hope this helps and saves someone from wasting 2 weeks of their life :)