Hi Sandi, Congratulations on the good news. I am really pleased for you :). I know how good it feels to get a solidly running system. You made one good point about IRQs. Do you know if the IRQs have mapped to the same cards the same way? Just out of interest. A recent post from another user suggested that a clean reinstall of Win98/LAWP to the SAME PC ended up with a poor result whereas the previous setup (same hardware, same software) had been fine and one thought expressed was that the IRQs may have been reassigned. I had a poorly performing MB on my first DAW and it turned out that the IDE chain caused the dropouts when it overloaded and some real time data was lost because the buffers on my sound card overflowed at that moment. So bigger buffers reduce the likelihood of glitching, hence Emagics default buffer size for the AW8. I went to a SCSI drive and everything was OK but with the next MB I couldn't believe how much better my IDE drive worked. Thanks for sharing your success. Ray