FrankE

I've got a notebook here that contains an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600. The release notes speak of compatibility to Radeon 9600 familiy. In the Past ATIs reference drivers didn't officially support mobile GPUs Does someone out there have any experinece in this Thanks Frank

Hi, Does anyone out there have Profile Pack 1 and the Diablo 2 profile for the MS Strategic Commander ? MS doesn't host these Files anymore. Thanks a lot Frank

I'm playing with the idea of buying a NB. I just want to make sure that I can upgrade the CPU later on.

Hi, first of all VESA local bus wasn't graphics only. (I think you meant VESA graphics BIOSes). VLB boards incorpporated up to three VESA slots even that allowed bus mastering. Even VLB-IDE controllers were available. My DX/2-66 had a Side Jr. plus Multi-I/O-Controller card. It was even capable of PIO4 and ECP/EPP (bidirectional communications on printer ports) and had highspeed serial ports with 16550 UARTs. - Amazing back then. You could have VLB running synchronous with the FSB. which was great with 486ers, especially with the later AMD ones (DX-40, DX/2-80, DX/4-120). The main disadvantage VLB had was: The standard was immature. many motherboards had electrical and H/F issues. All three slots were only to be used with 25 MHz FSB. According to the specification higher FSBs left one or two slots unusable. You could have luck and an additional card would work even at a higher clock. Otherwise you still had the chance to use the ISA portion of the slot (a VESA slot was a combination of a local bus and a 16-bit ISA part). With 33MHz PCI solutions were asynchronous to the FSB resulting in waitstates but a higher stability with up to four/five slots usable in all configurations. Thats why Intel promoted it as the only solution for their Pentiums. Any questions left ?

You can run those Athlon XPs an any of those chipsets. But current KT400 / KT400As won't provide FSBs > 166MHz DDR (=FSB333), altough KT400A will support memory bus speeds @ DDR400 FSB400 will require VIA a new release (somewhere I read KT600). Nforce2 is said to be capable of providing FSB400 (200MHz DDR), although NVidia didn't announce this up to now. Even if current steppings have their probs future revisions will do.

I have got three MSI / Asus Nforce2 rigs with old 4x GF4 Ti4200s up and running with no problem at all. Before I had flashed all boards with the most current BIOS revisions, so I'd suggest doing that if you have problems over there.

The "missing" HDD space is a result from the non-standardized size annotations of memory sizes. When talking of RAM : 1KB is 2^10 or 1,024 Bytes, 1MB is 1,024KB or 2^20 or 1,024*1,024 = 1,048,576 Bytes, 1GB is 1,024MB or 1,024*1,024KB or 2^30 or 1,024*1,024*1,024 = 1,073,741,814 Bytes. With HDDs the case is slightly different: HDD manufacturers usually claim 1KB as 10^3 or 1,000 Bytes, 1MB as 1,000KB or 10^6 or 1,000,000 Bytes, 1GB as 1,000MB or 10^9 or 1,000,000,000 Bytes. So 120*1,000,000,000 Bytes (as quoted by HDD standards) = equals 111.75871GB unformatted space in memory standards quotations. Please cut a little bit space due to formatting reasons (management overhead) This is one thing most people misunderstand. The memory size calculation is based on doubling of bus widths in history (8 bit to 16 bit to 32 bit to 64 bit to 128 bit to 256 bit), while the harddisk space calculation method uses "normal peoples" counting based on 10. As a side effect the figures presented by this method are "higher".

I'm sorry. Don't need no ISA cards anymore unless you can deliver some kind of PCI => ISA bridge.... Thanks, Frank

Or could the old Live! DOS driver work ? Could someone please take a look into this one ? I'm confronted with buying this Soundcard but have lots of old DOS games that need a native DOS environment (no WinXP/2K/Me/98/95 DOS box or compatibility mode...) Thanks Frank

personally i would bin the mobo if i had to go to 100mhz which is what my friend did. He got himself a MSI KT3 Ultra instead, which is rock solid. The boys over at MSI seem to have got control of those odd VIA chipsets. Frank

Hi, try this: set your FSB to 100MHz instead of 133 MHz. A friend of mine had installation issues with this board. All drives were recognized but booting from CD or copying larger files to HDD from CDR caused system crashes. setting back the FSB helpes with this though this isn't the speed the board ist supposed to work at. (Took me 6 hours to solve this mystery.) if this workaround helped ya, either can this board or take it back to the shop you bought it. Greetz, Frank