Burn in? was:7VIF4 Instability @ 166 FSB

Hey guys,

This is probably going to sound like a dumb question to most, but I have to
ask it anyway. I've heard of 'burn-in' from years past, but I always
thought of it as a testing process. Can a motherboard improve operationally
with a little bit of crunch/processing time? Can this initial working
period be helpful in 'seating' things a bit?

The reason I'm asking is that I had a miserable time getting my first 7VIF4
to work at 166 Mhz FSU. I sent it back to the vendor and received the
replacement last night. When I first started using it, I immediately
experienced instances where the mouse froze up but windows did not. The
scanner was just getting garbage. Software was starting up all by itself.
I also had a few lockups while processing video files (encoding). Needless
to say, I was thinking 'here we go again', and was pretty disappointed
(again) after about 4 hours. After a little bit of shut down time, I
started it up again before I went to bed. It's been running for 20 hours
since then, encoding video without any problems at all. Even my scanner
works properly now when it didn't at first. Incredible! Everything seems
to be running just fine now.

So is this initial burn-in real? It doesn't make any sense to me but it's
almost like it needed a short 'break-in' period to operate properly. Truth,
or just me looking for a (il)logical 'splanation?

Thanks,
Russ