^b0rG^

Runs fine on my roommates GF2MX, with a duron 800.

You may want to see if you have S.M.A.R.T. enabled on your HD in the bios. Just having this enabled causes network traffic, and therefore some cpu usage. Though I don't think it should be that extreme. The sblive may be part of your problem as well. It's a notoriously "hungry" peice of hardware needing lots of cpu time and memory. Also it tends not to play well with others. Try moving it to a different pci slot (make sure it's not in the one right below the agp slot ever, that's definately bad) so that it will grab a different irq. It should not share irq's with any other device if at all possible. On the subject of the 8500, have you tried the leaked drivers? I'm running the 6058's only leaked a few days ago. I keep up to date with www.rage3d.com which is THE source for ATi info. Hope some of this helps.

If you have to reset your machine to get a stable boot, or to boot at all then there is DEFINATELY a problem with your power supply. Either it simply can't handle the load, or is trying to die on you. This could affect all of the things you have mentioned sofar.

Seeing as you can burn fine with the drive this may not be your issue, but I had almost exactly the same problem until I replaced the cable I was using to connect the drive. IDE cables can go bad, and are almost always overlooked when they do. Can't hurt to try. Mine is smooth as butter now that I've replaced the cable.

This is more of an annoyance than a real problem, just hoping someone will have some suggestions. Sometimes when I bring up the run box (which I use a lot) it is very slow at accepting the characters I type. By slow I mean less than one character a second will appear on the line. I can type WAY faster than that and I'm impatient, so any help would be appreciated. Thanx in advance...

It does only happen in the run box, and yes I do actually have LOT of icons on it. It never refreshes them though as I use no background at all and have ram to spare as you can see in my sig. I will try dumping most of them in a folder as a test though and see if it helps.

Game ran beautiful for me at 1024x768 all details maxed. Not even the last level slowed down. (cept during bullet time of course...) hehe What card were you running last time you tried? Cause the 4600 you have now should have more than enough muscle with a cpu as fast as yours. Specially if my card can take it with a duron 800.

I have a strange problem I caused while messing around with media player a while back. I was trying to replace the Media Player executable with the one for version 6 "mplayer2.exe" since it loads faster. It was a real pain to get it to finally replace and then I thought better of it and tried to switch back. Now my wmplayer.exe file shows the correct icon, and launches fine when I click it. I can even right click any file set to open with it and choose "play" or "open" and it works perfectly. However, any file I double click to play gives an error stating: "Windows cannot find 'wmplayer.exe'. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again. To search for a file, click the Start button, and then click Search." Any clues as to how I can fix this annoying bug?

This is easy to do with almost any game. 1) Get a copy of clonecd. 2) Use the burner to read the image, it can read the copy protections schemes much more accurately than any rom drive. Also check the options for "read subchannel data" on both audio and data tracks. 3) Swap disks when it tells you to and burn away. 4) Play the dern game. This will work 99% of the time.

Cause there are a LOT of formats that default to media player. I may only play one .aif file or one .au file in the next 6 months, but I wanted all of 'em to use media player 6.

Not familiar with that particular program, but are you telling it to "close disk" when burning? Most programs give you the option to leave the disk open, but that causes problems in reading them until they are closed. Closing basically finalizes the TOC (Table Of Contents) which regular cdroms absolutely have to have in order to read a disk. CDR and CDRW drives can read disks that haven't been closed most times.

Quote: I heard that the 1st pci slot has some priority, so I put NICs in this one. Actually the first pci slot usually shares resources with the agp socket and should be the last slot you use. If yer not havin trouble though (IE: stuttering in games and such...) then stick with what ya have.

My roommate got my 7000 as a hand me down when I bought the 8500. His system was pretty much a duplicate of the one you described, only with a celery 450 proc. It ran like a champ. Check out the forums on www.rage3d.com, they are usually pretty quick to help with anything. You may also wanna download the latest leaked 8500 drivers. Notice I said the 8500 drivers, not the 7000 ones. The new drivers are unified at least in the 8500 set and support older cards as well with all the updated codebase intact. Should make a big difference. Also make sure "fast writes" are turned off in his bios.

You could simply hit Start | Run, then type "msconfig" and click over to the startup tab. Just incase anyone didn't know msconfig is alive and well in winxp.