<What are "ART" chips? I've never heard of them, and apparently none of <my serial ports have them. < <And if your serial ports do have ART chips, how is it that a software <virus managed to remove them? Good questions... I just put up a new PIII system and there ain't no art chips on it, just standard EX chipset. Allowing for the possibility that the UART (16550s) are somehow cooked the solution would be a serial board plugged in. However the level of integration is so high on the new generation board if the serial dies the whole board is dead and would fail POST. I'll assume you mean UART chips. If its a late model motherboard the two serial ports, the parallel The FDC and IDE are all comming out of one of the 144leg chips. They have little likelyhood of failure (they are 16550 cell libraires in the ASIC) without taking other functions with them. they can be programatically turned of from the CMOS setup (usually the advanced chipset function in AMI). I've used that capability to map out on board serial port 2 for a modem at the same address. However if the bios chip is wrong and does not know of the local chipset capabilities the board level initilization will not work and devices can and will be left out. I found that out trying to use a bios chip from a 386 board for a more highly integrated 486 board... it did boot but many functions were not right. it did prove the original bios chips was fried (27C512P (OTC eprom) totally dead) I used my programmer to copy a BIOS from a similar card into a handy 27C eprom and it worked fine. Like I said if winders boots, major part of the machine has to be there and working. It was true with ALTAIR and hasn't changed. Then again I still run S100 hardware and VAX next to my P166. Current prices for a new mother board without cpu are low enough to consider replacement a viable option. Allison