As a follow up to the past problems I've been having with the XFX nForce 630i model MG-630i-7159, I upgraded the BIOS on the recommendation of Adrian. It was a good recommendation and I should have remembered to try updating the BIOS to see if these problems went away, but unfortunately I have to report that it didn't work. Not only did it not work, I had to jump through a lot of hoops to install the BIOS update which is a procedure I would NEVER expect any normal person to put up with.
First of all, I had to register on XFX's website to be able to find the update. Once I got the update, it came as an ISO image which on the face of it is pretty convenient. All I had to do is get an ISO burning software like Nero or the free ISO Recorder to burn a bootable CD. Once the disk was burned, the disk can be booted on any computer or at least that was the idea. But the optical drivers failed to load on my computer which had a Blu-ray ROM drive so I had to replace the optical drive with a regular DVD drive to get the disk to boot properly. What's scary about the disk is that it automatically runs the BIOS flash utility with no user interaction so it might be a good idea to toss the disk after you're done because you don't want to automatically flash something else. Maybe there's a safety mechanism and maybe there isn't but I wasn't eager to test it out on another motherboard. I would have preferred just getting the BIOS update and I would have created my own boot disk without this nonsense.
Once updated, Vista puked big time and every single driver in the computer had to be remounted and reinstalled. This is something that always drives me nuts about Windows. I mean you just plug in a webcam to a different USB port and the damn thing makes you reinstall the drivers. You would think that Microsoft would be able to detect that it's the same stuff and just seamlessly remount those things without freaking the user out. Anyhow, this computer had to reinstall every driver in the system and after all that was done, the problem probably got worse. Before the update, I could at least wake the computer and log in and then it would lock up. Now it just wakes up but you get no mouse and keyboard and the cursor on the password prompt would just blink.
What's the problem and do we blame this on the motherboard vendor or NVIDIA? I don't know since neither XFX or NVIDIA has an explanation. I understand that computers are very complex and there are bugs, but I don't understand how this problem has been permitted to go on so long without a resolution. I remember talking to Gigabyte about a problem with one of their motherboards failing to post when a Blu-ray ROM was hooked up to the system and Gigabyte responded a few weeks later with a BIOS update that fixed the problem. That's a model of how you're supposed to handle these problems.