On rare occasions, it somehow simply forgets how to start. It seems to lose track of the operating system, or perhaps the entire disk.

The bios sees all three drives, but when the next window flashes up during the start process now, "0" and "1" show no drives, but for some weird reason "2," "3," and "4" show the three hard drives. Obviously the drives should occupy 0,1, and 2. I don't even know how this is possible.

Loading the basic system on my Win 7 DVD and pulling up the command window I can address drive C, D, and E properly, at least as far as doing a directory listing.

Last time the system simply "got better." Now it's in the middle of a restart process involving a full disk check. Not a speedy process on 500 GB drives.

I'm beginning to wonder if the Tyan motherboard on-board SATA system is working at 100 percent. Is it possible to buy an add-on SATA card and convince the motherboard to use it? If it comes to that.