jmmijo

Originally posted by Philipp: Quote: None. I actually bought my first modem years later Man you missed some fun times back then, I remember setting up my C64 with a cheap ass Taihaho 300 baud Pulse Dial modem back in the day and running either Color BBS or something very like that app that supported ANSI graphics. It was very fun indeed

So tell us Philip, just how many modems did you have in that IBM box or did you just get a rack of USR v.Everythings and used some kind of color BBS app ?!?

Yes, CLI is very handy and powerful. I cut my teeth on both the trash 80 model I's and II's using CP/M back in the high school in the mid to late 70's myself I also had a chance to mess about with both an Osborne and Kaypro portable machine....

Nice classic retro box there Now if we're talking PC which really means Personal Computer not just an acronym for IBM and compatible boxes, then my first was the CBM Vic 20 followed closely by the C64 and a 1541 Disc Drive. Specs for the Vic 20, I can't really remember, I think it was either 8 or 16k and I didn't have a tape drive for it, just bought a few carts like Mutant Camels for one Specs for the C64, well 64K of ram, BASIC onboard, 3 voice, monophonic SID onboard, built-in kayboard, pretty functional I must say. The floppy drive had a storage capacity of 170K per side, it was a single sided drive but you could take a paper punch and notch the flip-side of the blank disk It was painfully slow to load over the serial bus for sure, at least until the Fastload carts showed up....

Considering today is the 1st of April, I'm taking this piece of info with a giant salt lick

Here is what you need to do to verify the SATA HD issue, is the motherboard an Intel chipset board or does it have a Via/SiS chipset ?!? If it's the latter then I'm afraid you have to have a floppy connected to do the F6 install. Sometimes if you set the IDE mode to Enhanced instead of Auto the SATA drive will be mapped into the Primary MAS/SLA position so that you do not have to load any floppy disk drivers, however in my experience this isn't always the case. Also note that if there is any multi-card readers installed in this cube, then you'll need to disable the onboard USB until you re-install the OS. This should allow the OS to re-assign the proper drive letters. Once the OS is installed then you should be able to enable the USB once more. I'm not sure if having the Bluetooth enabled is not also causing the drive letter rearrangment or not, however I would dsiable it as well and use a PS2 KB/Mouse instead.

@Philip, the Mac Mini uses a fanless design I take it, all passive heatsinks and the like ?!? My only gripe with the basic specs was that it could have been a little more beefy. More basic RAM and a faster CPU, however, since you're packaging it with a more efficient OS you most likely didn't really need a faster CPU. That being said I think all machines should come with a base of 512MB of RAM and at least an 80GB HD for storage

Originally posted by theefool: Quote: That NTFS for 98 looks pretty good, but it doesn't work with EFS. I was going to suggest using Partition magic, which can supposedly convert NTFS to FAT32. It can and it does work, I've used the rescure floppy discs to do this, but like anything you run the risk of losing data so I was suggesting doing an archival backup first then just delete the NTFS partition and start over again with using Win 98 to create FAT32 partitions

Another option to recover the data is to install the drive into an external expansion chassis, for either a PATA/IDE or SATA HD. This external chassis can be either USB2 or Firewire, depending on which interface you need. Then connect it up to some other machine that is running either XP Home or Pro and recover the data to some other removable media, let's say a CD-R for instance Once you've recovered and/or archived the data, then you can use dosfreaks suggestion and delete the existing NTFS partition and recreate a bunch of smaller FAT32 partitions.

Sure I could see this happening, the Xindy crap killed the series really ;(

Well since I've not had xDSL for quite some time the only thing I can tell you is that the USB models *all* seem to have issues. Stick with the ethernet models for sure I do however use an ethernet Linksys gateway/router and it works great with the supplied RCA(Thompson) Cable Modem. Looks like you're going the all-in-one route which is nice in that you will have only one box to administer.

I'm not aware of any app/program modification, other then that one hidden folder.

The System Volume Information is normal for XP installs on all HD's that have been formated and are recognized by the OS. I think it's part of the System Restore function as well. I do believe that ME will just ignore this folder. I'm not sure if Archives gets created however, I don't seem to recall this one...

It could be an issue with the motherboard but just to narrow things down, this is what I do to troubleshoot this kind of problem. 1) Disconnect all the power to any drives, optical, HD and floppy. Leave only the main ATX power connected and any 4/8 pin auxillary power connected to the motherboard. 2) Disconnect all data ribbon cables to all drives, either from the drives or from the motherboard connectors, I like to use the motherboard connectors just in case of a bad cable. 3) Remove all expansion cards, this includes the graphics card, modem, sound, nic etc... Anything that's onboard is not a problem at this point. 4) Remove all memory modules, yes all of them. Basically you want to strip down the machine so all that is left connected is the power to the motherboard, the CPU/Heatsink/Fan and the front panel connectors. Now try the powering the machine up and see if you hear any POST beep errors. If you still only get the CPU/Heatsink fan to power on and no post beep error codes then this sounds like one of three parts has failed, or some combination. The Power Supply, the CPU, the Motherboard.

UPDATE: I just picked up the Myst 10th Anniversary DVD Edition from CompUSA last week. It was only $20(USD) and came with updated versions of Myst, Riven and Exile on three separate DVD's. Ubisoft updated each one to play properly on XP. However, I did have to adjust the compatibility mode with Riven to Windows 98/ME and it worked flawlessly with Quicktime 6.5.xx installed. The collection comes with QT 6.3 so if you have not updated to that version then you can do so. Also the making of for each title is included too

Well, actually is no longer an AMD marketing gimmick as you say as now Intel uses a model number to describe their latest P4 cpu's as well As for the performance difference, well if you had everything identical, including the OS and apps, then you would see a slight increase in performance with the Athlon 64 over it's cousin the XP. The reason is simply the more effecient design of the 64 architecture and the fact that the Athlon 64/FX/Opteron have onboard MMU's thus bypassing the need for the chipset to do this function. As for web site showing benchmarks, well, I can't think of any except perhaps checking out Toms Hardware Guide. Myself I take many benchmarks with a grain of salt, as real world experience and use is a better guage for me. I've built quite a few XP and 64 systems and have come to the conclusion that the 64-bit CPU's will really come into their own once you see the official release of Windows XP 64-bit Edition. Currently you can see a substantial performance gain from using a 64-bit distro of *nix as well

and of course Diablo II: LOD didn't make the list

I relize you're on a budget, but are you intending to play any games ?!? If so, then ditch the idea of using the onboard graphics card and go with a lower-end graphics card like the nVidia 5200 or the ATi 9200 series cards. Decent graphics and gameplay for not much money As for the Sempron CPU, it's basically a rebadged Palimino core Athlon XP. It's actually a decent CPU for the price. The sweet spot seems to be the Sempron 2800+.

Originally posted by Wicked101: Quote: If noise is really a problem and you dont want any chassis fan the I would suggest to get water-cooling Yeah, that's another quiet option, just more expensive then even the Zalman copper cooler is all

Originally posted by froggy1: Quote: thanks. I have no chasis fans, simply because i thought they would add more noise. I was hoping a nice single processor fan could keep everything in check. Sometimes yes and sometimes no. You really can't know until you run the machine under some heavy loads before answering this. Remember, heat is not your friend, and if puttung up with some extra noise keeps the machine cooler then so be it, however, an all Copper CPU/Heatsink Fan will help to keep that space heater a bit more cooler then with a stock heatsink fan

You may have to find an update/patch for that particular HOMM, wether it's the 1st thru the 4th or the expansion packs. Sometimes the error is the copy protection on the CD itself. The patches usually help to resolve issues like this. Of course it's possible that the error is being caused by a device driver, like say the sound and/or graphics card Also try reinstalling DX9.0c, d/l the network or the redestributable version and see what happens. Sometimes a support file associated with DX has gotten corrupted and maybe causing this error. One more thing to verify is that the latest chipset/inf drivers are installed, for your motherboard chipset, get the latest OEM version. It sounds like you have an Intel chipset motherboard, so grab the latest INF drivers from their website.

HERE's the one I'd recommend All copper and uses a nice big 120mm cooling fan... Remember, you get what you pay for, the stock coolers are only copper core, hence the reason the fan speeds up to cool the CPU down, it's thermally controlled. Well basically all the CPU fans are this way, so it also can help over all system cooling by checking out your chassis, if it has any extra case fan mounts, then use them as well. You can pick up thermally controlled 80, 92 and 120mm chassis fans too

Exactly, I recently purchased a notebook for my father and it has XP as well and he runs the HOMM series just fine I told him to ignore this same message and everything installed and ran properly.

What I found interesting was in a past article in the magazine Scientific American. Here's a preview of that article online at their site

Originally posted by stormonts: Quote: Controller ports are set to Enhanced. The computer has the Intel INF version 6.3.0.1008 installed and all devices are correctly identified in Device Manager. After we perform the clone, the PC is shut off and the IDE drive is removed. In terms of the SATA drivers being loaded, I assume they are since each device is identified correctly and Device Manager reports 2 x Primary IDE and 2 x Secondary IDE connections. Not quite, in Enhanced mode, there should be (3)Three channels listed, the Primary/Secondary IDE ports and the third being the pair of SATA ports Even on Intel boards this should be the case, it works this way on all of the systems I've ever built. Are you sure there isn't a third party SATA controller on that motherboard ?!?