Vasco

I have a RAID controller from Promise (TX2000). When I boot the system it says "scanning IDE drives......". This takes over 20 seconds before switching to the RAID controller and boot up. Is there a way to make the boot-up-process faster? In the BIOS I chose SCSI as first boot device. Anything else I deactivated (Floppy, IDE etc.) My system: ASUS A7N8X nForce2 Athlon XP 2600+, not o/c'ed 2 x 512 MB DDRAM PC-3200 CL3 (Apacer) MSI GeForce 4 Ti 4400 Acer DVD 16x Plextor CD-writer 48x Promise FastTrak TX2000 2 x WD 1200JB HD PS Enermax 350W Sound onboard (nVidia) Network onboard (3Com) WindowsXP Pro, SP 1

Connect a HD to all channels? Do you mean I should install additional HDs and connect them to the IDE to make the boot-up faster? 8)

Thanks for the tip, have to try it when I'm at home.

OK thanks I thought maybe there is a way to make it faster. But it seems to be normal. Thanks again

I can't believe it. - Age of Empires (RoR)/ Age of Kings / AoK The Conquerors I started playing AoE in 1998 and I am still a big fan of AoK TC! Best RTS game ever, really. - Lemmings was also an addictive game - but many years ago - Shadow Warrior and Duke Nukem brings back nice memories, it's the time when I played multiplayer for the first time via phone line - Unreal/UT are great shooters - Quake III Arena and Team Arena are evergreens

ConQueso is absolutely right. Cordless mouse is good for the office, but a 'real' gamer needs a high quality mouse WITH cable I use a simple Logitech Optical Wheelmouse (USB). Logitech really rocks, though Microsoft also produces good mice.

I fully agree with Sapiens. Buy a card with Geforce4 TI-4200 GPU. It's definitely worth its money. And like Brian said, it supports DirectX8 in hardware. Plus Vertex- and Pixel-Shader, which will be used more and more in new games. If you want to buy a video card for the future (2 - 3 years I mean) for a good price, go for GF TI-4200.

I bought an 18" Samsung TFT. I am thinking of a new video card as well. The monitor supports DVI. Now my question: is there an advantage of using DVI on both sides (video card and monitor)? Is the picture better or the monitor faster? Or does it change simply nothing? If not I don't have to buy a new video card with DVI.

You made me curious Blade about the new Matrox card. I will wait and let's see what magazines etc. say about it...

Thanks for the input. I think I will go for a GF4 with DVI then. About ATI's Radeon: they have good hardware, but as far as I know their driver are not best and can cause some problems. For the image quality I would have to buy a Matrox, but then I can forget about UT2003