Someone who shall remain nameless, suggested that I install AMIDiag on a computer that actually uses the AMI BIOS ala e-machine, since there are millions of people with these machines who might benefit. Therefore, I put together an e-machine i400 and left everything as it would be directly out of the box and installed an old copy of WIN98SE. 

Surprisingly enough the majority of the drivers are present in Win98SE for the video as well as the chipset, O.K., I did not say they were the best drivers, but good enough to get up and running and probably the same found on most e-machines at delivery.

Because I purchased this as a bare board and CPU, I had to do a little research on what type of modem and/or communication devices were present. After a couple hours of sifting through several hundred web sights and forums, I concluded that the machine in question came with either a PCTel HSP modem or a Lucent chipset modem. I was out of PCTel Winmodems so a Lucent would have to do. 
Just to make things a little interesting, after everything was setup, I upgraded the operating system to Windows ME.

After 2 hours of batch runs on the e-machine of all tests including multiples of audio and video (I really wanted to stress the software and hardware), the results were less than stellar. Even though I had loaded up on the video and audio tests for the batch run, not all of the tests ran. As soon as the first test in audio or video failed none of the other tests were attempted. While in the Diagnostic applet, I failed to make sure that the setting to halt on error was set to false, so none of the advanced tests were attempted. This is actually a good feature in the diagnostic software as any attempt to try a test not supported by the hardware may cause damage to it. Congrats to AMI for realizing this and not making the advanced tests run in audio and video by default. 

Just for you e-machine users out their who can't get AVI files to work with the onboard video with default Win9X drivers, according to the AMIDiag result's, the proper filters aren't installed so you will have to use ATI's drivers for full functionality. Audio is another problem as the Crystal audio chipset suffers from poor frequency sampling between output and input and lousy software mixer drivers. In fact, after trying multiple drivers for the Cirrus/Crystal sound on board from many different sources I have come to the conclusion that there is no way to get it to pass a single test from AMIDiag. 

The errors on audio were always the same "output signal did not match input signal" TEST FAILED... A ray of hope? Probably not in your foreseeable future as this e-machine was not exactly designed for high-end audio and video editing, at least not without some major component upgrades. Since you can still disable the onboard video via a jumper on this model and install a good PCI variant of the Radeon 7000 video card, I did... Results were positive as all tests passed except for the 3D test, which in this case was not the goal, but just to get good AVI results.

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Conclusion