DocSilly

Bursar I have to correct some details: Quote: Failing that, you can get 127 devices chained off of USB (IIRC), so get a USB external drive, and start stacking them up! That's correct but it won't do you any good with HDD's due to the very low bandwidth of USB. This "might" change a lil with USB2 which offers 400Mbit/s (80MByte/s) bandwidth but I really doubt it'll be used for HDD as an interface. Quote: For RAID 5, you need at least 3 disks, and one of them is not usuable by the system, so that hacks a 1/3 off of the amount of space available. That's not correct for RAID-5, you're describing RAID 3 Array With Dedicated Parity Drive where one HDD is used for the Parity data only. RAID-5 writes the Parity info over all drives. The advantage of RAID-5 is that performance is close to RAID-0 (with a good RAID card with plenty of cache) and redundancy is so good that any one drive can fail and be replaced and the system would rebuild itself. More info on different RAID levels can be found here: http://www.dell.com/us/en/biz/topics/vectors_1999-raid.htm http://arstechnica.com/paedia/r/raid-1.html

Quote: Pagefile Tweaking The pagefile in Win2K isn't dynamic like the swapfile in Win9x, so it is even more important to optimize your virtual memory settings for this OS than it ever was for Win9x. With that said, there are a few guidelines you should follow when optimizing your virtual memory. - Unlike Win9x, you can split your pagefile over several hard drives. It generally isn't recommended to split up your pagefile over separate partitions, but if you have two similar speed hard drives (you could use a 5400 and a 7200 rpm drive together, but you would want to stay away from a jump of more than about 2000 rpm), splitting your pagefile over the two drives is a great way to improve performance. - Your pagefile should almost always be larger than your system memory. If you have less than 96 MB of ram, I recommend having at least 1.5 times your physical ram size in your pagefile, and you might even benefit from 2x. If you have between 96 and 256 MB of RAM, the Microsoft recommendation of RAM +30 MB appears to work well -- but if you are at the lower range of that spectrum and do a lot of multitasking you might benefit from a setting like 1.5x RAM. If you have 256 MB of RAM, you probably only need 256 MB of swapfile space. Unless you have your computer set to full dump in case of crash mode, any more would be a waste. To set your pagefile, go into the advanced tab of the System applet and click on the Performance Options button. At the bottom of the dialogue box that pops up, there will be a button that says change. Click that to go into the Virtual Memory screen. From within this sub-applet you can set your virtual memory settings, and Windows even gives its own recommendation for pagefile size. This is from the Windows 2000 Hard Drive and Memory Tweak Guide at http://www.tweak3d.net/tweak/win2kmem . I have 384MB and my pagefile is set at a fixed size of 400MB.

First lets look at what RAID level most users will use ... RAID-0 cause they don't care about redundancy but love speed. But what do you speed up with RAID-0 ? Sustained Transfer Rates ... and when will you take advantage of STR ? well, when you're transfering large amounts of data and that's when you're into video editing or something comparable. Games load a splitsecond faster but most won't be able to notice the difference. Hmmm, so Sustained Transfer Rates ain't that important (in my eyes), so what is ? Random Access and seek times, the faster the better! And what gives you best of both ? SCSI, 10K drives (or Cheetah X15 *drool*)! Most users will use RAID-0 (with little overall improvement)... RAID-1 (mirroring) will be rarely used since it won't gain any performance and RAID-0+1 (needs 4 drives) is the highest those lil onboard controllers can provide, you can forget about RAID-5 or higher. Another thing with RAID-0 ... you'll lose everything when one drive in the array dies ... so better have a good backup strategy. RAID-5 is the sweet spot for RAID between performance and redundancy for most serious people (and the industrie), it's also available for IDE but those controllers cost a pretty penny (I think Ultra66 start at $300 and Ultra100 at $400). I say that SCSI gives a much better performance boost over IDE-RAID ... but IDE offers more GB per $ for your downloads and pr0n collection ... SCSI costs more for less GB's ... Conclusion: Gamers should chose SCSI (at least 10K drives) for ultimate performance when they can afford it, maybe paired with a large IDE drive for downloads/MP3/backup. I guess the ultimate solution would be an Ultra160 RAID controller (with 128MB cache) and 3 Cheetah X15 in RAID-5 for ultimate performance and redundancy ... but this is only an option for those who have too much money to burn (hey YOU, you can also sponsor MY setup when you still have money to burn, pretty please ??) IDE users with a RAID board should experiment (when they like to do that) but shouldn't hope for SCSI performance since the slow access/random seek times of the IDE drives will remain slow ... and they should work on a good backup strategy when they use RAID-0 (just in case). If ya want more info from those who know a lot more than me, go to www.storagereview.com and check their bbs, there is much more than I can put in my reply here. [This message has been edited by DocSilly (edited 15 October 2000).]

Do you happen to have 2 CD-drives ? I know that Win2k only allows CD-audio for the CD-drive with the lowest driveletter ... weird but that's how it works for me. I use my CD-R as audio CD-player and I had to give it the lower driveletter.

btw, such a "hack" is built into Win2000 Just go into the Device Manager | Mouse | Properties | Advanced Settings | Sample Rate (offers 20/40/60/80/100 reports per second)

Did you have Adaptec EZCD 3.5c installed ? I know that WMP7 killed my setup when I had EZCD 3.5c installed and upgraded to WMP7 which comes with it's own adaptec basic burner software ....

Get it at www.download.com

hehe, wasn't on this board for a few days Easiest way to see if your peripherals are the troublemakers would be to remove them. I know that the SB Live and Geforce are hibernating (have them running on my P2B-LS) so I would suggest to pull the WinTV and ISDN card. If your system hibernates try to add one card at a time to see if it is only one or maybe even both.

I have to disagree .... while this is a nice try to fire up another PC vs COnsole discussion .... MGS still delivers an awesome singleplayer experience like only few other games. I'm not a multiplayer freak and good singleplayer games are rare (HL, System Shock 2, SoF was also kinda nice), the last good one was Deus Ex. I agree, the textures are outdated compared to UT or Q3A ... but they're from a 2 year old console game that was programmed for TV resolutions. Why do I still like it? Because it has a story that keeps ya playing and the dialogs are much better than the ones in Deus Ex. The gamemarket is really dry at the moment and it's not that expensive at $35. Let me just say that pretty graphics alone don't make a good game ... /me points to Klingon Honor Guard And concerning crappy camera angle, I've seen much worse on PC games. Now you might continue with your PC vs Console fight ... I don't care.

Norton Speed Disk ... it optimizes everything, including the MFT (Master File Table), PageFile, free space, open files and metadata even on a running system, all other programs will ask you to reboot to do so. AT least that's how it was earlier this year in a roundup with Norton Speed Disk 5.0 standalone and others.

All components have to support ACPI/hibernation to use it. I remember that my SB Live had problems with hibernation when Win2000 was still beta. It would go to sleep and wake up but with an annoying buzzing sound that wouldn't go away. As usual make sure that all drivers are the latest available ... do you have any hardware that is not 100% Win2000 compatible by any chance?

I'm pretty sure that it is a problem with the Detonator 3 in general, the only fix will come from nvidia ... about time that new leaked drivers show up ...

Check out the GeforceFAQ, they have a section that deals with Athlon and it's problems. Also make sure that your powersupply has no less than 300W, the Geforce cards are powerhungry (first generation, Geforce 256 ... not the GTS 2).

This has been answered before, did you search the forums?? lookie here

I think you will run earlier into limitations from your mobo before you hit the limitations from the OS. Win2000 Pro supports 4GB and I guess that Win9x supports 1.5-2GB .... while most mobo's hit their limitation at 1GB RAM. Dang it, I have 384MB on my Win2000 box and I don't feel the need for more. So, both OS support up to 1GB RAM .... do you really consider getting 1GB RAM or more? I can say that memory management is WAY better in Win2000 ... Win9x is fine up to 256MB but for more consider Win2000.

most definetly ! backup your harddrives before you change their status to dynamic.

lemme take a lookie into my magic bookmarks .... me thinks this one should do the job.

It can be done, it's called software RAID which is supported by NT4 and Win2000. The change from regular drives to software RAID differs between NT4 and Win2000, so let us know what OS you're using. btw, drives in a software RAID can not be accessed from Win9x and so.

Either select the manufacturer from your mouse from the long list or try "{Standard mouse types) | Standard PS/2 Port Mouse" and select "Device Manager | Mice and pointing devices | yourmouse | Properties | Advanced Settings | Wheel Detection -> Assume wheel is present" hmmm, maybe you want to switch between a generic 2 button and a PS/2 wheel mouse ? [This message has been edited by DocSilly (edited 02 September 2000).]

Concerning IE using 90% and up: some FLASH or JAVA banners are able to bring IE to it's knees. Try Webwasher and see if it helps to filter out those banners.

I might soon be "somewhere" in that corporate world when everything works out fine in my near future SHS, does SUN use "regular consumer HDD's" to build their lil storagewonders, like a big 20 disk RAID array using 10K Cheetahs ? btw, I know about server and storagefarms somewhere out there in the corporate world ... but this is way out there ... while I would be happy with a small RAID0 setup with three Cheetah X15 for now

hmmm, lets see .... todays largest single harddrive is 80 GB (Maxtor DiamondMax 80), quick calculations tell us that you still need 13 of those drives to break the TB mark. This would be the mother of a RAID array, 13x80GB in RAID0 ... but stop, you might want redundancy, so you would to add a few more drives for RAID5 ... and it would require a sophisticated RAID controller. edit cursed by blindness I missed this on the Maxtor homepage: Check http://www.maxtor.com/products/MaxAttach/MaxAttachExplorer.htm , you can stack up 4 of their MaxAttach 400 NAS with 240GB each and get almost 1 TB ... /edit [This message has been edited by DocSilly (edited 30 August 2000).]

Take a look at http://www.3dspotlight.net/tweaks/win2k_services/index.shtml .

It's a known problem of the detonators ... Check the Geforce FAQ, they'll explain everything. I only don't like that they suggest to edit the registry for OpenGL games .... I prefer to edit the mentioned things in the nt4_disp.inf and reinstall the drivers I just don't like the thought to play more in the registry than I really have to. You can also check right here for a detailed howto for editing the nt4_disp.inf

ZoneAlarm needs the patch that's on the frontpage after SP1. Don't forget to enter the second PC's IP/subnet mask in the advanced security settings if you haven't done so already. I have no idea about AtGuard but ZoneAlarm works as usual after the patch ...