jmmijo

I've not had a chance to try them out yet

Originally posted by Waffler: Quote: As it is only necessary to post 100 times to become a senior member, shouldn't there be a higher rank for the everyday users of these forums who have 1000's of posts? Ah, you mean a Googlplex Member

Here's what I think maybe happening, you may not like it but if you want to recover any data then I would suggest replacing the HD with a new one as I'm guessing that Windows has barfed onto the filesystem and corrupted some system files You can attempt to do a repair install with your original Windows OS media this way it will retain most if not all of your current app settings and configuration. You will need to reinstall and later SP's and/or security patches as well as any of the latest device drivers for the mobo chipset, graphics, sound etc... Now back to my original point, I'd do a fresh install onto a new HD and connect up that second drive and backup any data I wanted/needed to the new HD. Then I would use the diags tools that you can d/l from the HD manufacturers website to zero out the entire drive and do a reformat/check of the the whole HD. Sometimes the whole mess gets started by hardware that is starting to flake out on you. Since I consider HD's to be pretty good with all the manufacturers now a days, there are some drives that will just fail long before their warranty period has expired, meaning 1 year on most desktop drives now They are also pretty darn cheap and can be easily purchased from any online or brick/mortar retailer If you have any older/smaller drives hanging around this could be a substitute, especially if your funds are in short supply...

@APK, I've even seen Aopen's own memory, formally known as Apacer and now called AM1, not even function in one or two of their own mobo's Now this is strange however upon looking at the BIOS rev of said mobo and finding it's the original release I updated the BIOS and low and behold that same memory worked now, hmmmmmm

Here's my personal experience building boxes over the years. This is almost always an issue of flaky/bad/incompatible memory. I'd say about 98% of the time I'd find this to be a problem with the install of Windows, especially 2K/XP as they slam the hardware during installation, which in my opinion is a good thing as it's a kind of verification of the system hardware You'll find that many/most of the BIOS updates from the mobo manufacturers are indeed corrections/fixes in the timing of the BIOS code for more and more memory modules/manufacturers, at least this is what Aopen America has told me If you have the latest BIOS rev installed for that model Asus board then you have to look at a possible bad memory module, I find this is especially true of the more generic non-name brand modules out there. This is not to say they wouldn't work but sometimes there are problems getting them to work in some makes/models of mobo's

@APK, does this app work on XP Pro ?!?

Well a quick answer is that many/most motherboard manufacturers do not allow the user to adjust these settings. That being said it's possible that there is some kind of manual setting rather then AUTO, you'll have to check the BIOS settings carefully for this. Another option maybe that a later BIOS rev will allow this, check FIC's website for more info on this possibility

You're welcome and glad to hear it's now working

Yes I can see where the confusion comes into play here I've always used P4 approved power supplies with AMD Athlon systems and they all work just fine. You will not have to use the extra auxillary power connector(s) that come with these power supplies however, so just zip tie them up out of the way and all will be good to go

Hmm, I've d/l pretty much all the updated drivers from Intel's site, including that driver package and didn't have any trouble with them. I use the package to update many system builds I do on a daily basis without any error message at all. Either something is going on with the d/l or perhaps finding a mirror site with these same drivers would be better. As for a mirror site, I can't think of one, sorry

My guess is that you need to install the device drivers for the onboard AC97 sound. You may want to locate the motherboard drivers disk that came with your machine or try to locate the drivers at the various chipset manufacturers site. One thing that could help is to post the make/model of this motherboard or the make/model of the machine, if it's a Dell/HP/Gateway etc....

Sorry but I have no real benchmarks to link for you here, however I can give you my own, albeit, subjective take on this. 1) You have to verify that your current motherboard supports both the 400MHz FSB and the BARTON core CPU's. Chances are that it does and my need a BIOS update too but it's good to double check that 2) I've built some Athlon 64 boxes using the Aopen AK86-L motherboard. It's based around the VIA KT800 chipset. It's a decent entry level type board and once I installed XP Pro (32-bit) with all the drivers and such. I did feel that the desktop seemed to be running much smoother and seemed a bit zippier when windows opened and closed. Again these are my own observations with the Athlon systems. Some used the 3200 and some the 3400. But since I didn't have them built and testing at the same time I couldn't give you much on how they compared side-by-side...

No problem, just remember to let us know if this works or not

Since XP - SP2 already comes with DX9.0c you don't need to install that component. However I would go to Intel's website and d/l and install both the latest chipset(inf) drivers and the graphics drivers. Be sure to reboot the machine after each install, it should ask you this of course After you've done this please retest these games again and let us know what happens...

Originally posted by animex: Quote: I just bought an extra 1GB DDR. Currently the system has 768MB DDR (256+512). The motherboard has 3 slots for RAM, is it possible to go over the motherboard max limit RAM (maybe there is some software allow you to tweak the board or something)? Thanks! Like peterh said it appears you can't, here's the info from the ECS site. One thing to note is that according to Via's website, this chipset can access up to 4GB. So this leads me to believe that ECS has a hardware limitation on this board.

Well I know what you're thinking and no, like Intel, AMD will only support SMP on their Opteron platforms, period!!! You will however be surprised by how affordable some of the dual-Opteron motherboards and cpu's actually are. You will have to spend some initial funds on this and of course ECC-REG memory as well

I know that on Adaptecs RAID and Zero Channel cards like the 2010s there is a CD that comes with the controller card and it's bootable to a special configuration/flasher utility. You could try using the CD that came with that controller and see if it's bootable. Make sure to change the boot order in your bios to the CD drive before the HD. If this does not work then you may need to RMA the card to Adaptec for servicing

Originally posted by sm5w2: Quote: Would that give me what I want, or will ghost replicate the NTFS version on Drive #1 as it copies it to drive 2? Ghost will replicate exactly what is on the master/source drive onto the target/destination drive. That is what it's supposed to do

AFAIK you can't However I think you maybe able to take the long way around, let me explain. PM has a function to convert a partition from NTFS into a FAT16/32 partition. Try resizing the partition into a FAT16, this means it will need to fit into a 2GB limit. Once done you should be able to boot off of this as NT4.xx supports both NTFS and FAT16. Once done you should be able to convert back into an NTFS 2 partition. I think the NTFS 1.xx was for NT3.xx if I'm not mistaken.

Actually that should be a decent rig for a lot of fairly recent games. My dad has an old Gateway Solo 9300, it only has an old P3-600 with 256MB of ram and a shared 16MB graphics card. Of course he mainly plays the HOMM series of RTS's so there isn't a whole lot of power needed. I also agree that the Sony Vaio's are tweaked towards DVD playback and presentations, however I still like and prefer an ATi graphics card for DVD playback Also note that 3D Mark 2003/2005 are really geared towards the higher end desktop/notebook range of machines, basically 3GHz+ boxes with 512MB or more and higher end graphics cards. I prefer to use 3D Mark 2001-SE for a better DX8.xx benchmark, this is most likely the type of games you really want to run on that machine anyway...

Yeah, I have to take a look myself. I enjoyed the gibblishness of the previous Quake's and I still think the audio soundtrack on the first was da bomb. I had never heard of Trent Reznor(9 Inch Nails) until I listened to that disc

Damn, I haven't even installed and played Doom 3 yet

Also note that DVD readers have come down so much in price that it's not much of a cost difference to purchase a new one over just a CD reader Or just add one as a second drive too...

First thing I would try is by verifying that I had the latest 4in1 service pack installed, v4.53, from ViaArena.com. If this failes to resolve the issue, then try re-installing both DX9.0c once more and the nVidia graphics card drivers. Be sure you reboot after re-installing each set of drivers. If it's still not working then reboot the machine and go into the system BIOS and change the AGP 8x to 4x and disable the fast write AGP option and anything else that has to do with the AGP graphics modes. Save and exit the new settings and see what happens. It may have something to do with incompatibility with the motherboard chipset and the gpu... Also, does this graphics card come with an auxillary power connector ?!? My ATi X800 Pro does so you have to provide a separate connector for this. I use a connector that isn't connected to a drive or anything else just to make sure it's on it's own power rail

You do realize that many of the media players rely on UDP from the reciept of said media data packets don't you This is something that's been around for awhile however I'm not sure if I really like something that can potentially flood my connection with useless and possibly DDOS type attacks as a standard