DrSchmoe

Anyway, both pieces of software work under 2K, HOWEVER (big however), the cores that allow specific use of hardware (geforce, rage 128, etc), need to be rewritten for Win2k. Basically, untill the software is "re-optimized" for the new OS, the more advanced features are not available. This will probably take several months. First, the video chipset manufacturer needs to release 2k drivers that support the advanced hardware funtionality. Then, the software company needs to recode their software to utilize the new methods in those drivers. In otherwords, you won't see SPDIF support for several weeks (maybe 8 now that LW2k is out), and motion compensation and IDCT until a month or two after drivers are finalized by your video card vendor.

Yes, the general path of this thread has been one of equine bondage After reading the last two pages, I just about coughed up a lung. This is "grade-A" great stuff. Even though it isn't about hardware this might be the most interesting thread I have read in several months.

The inlcuded ATi drivers on the Win2k CD are fairly decent. However, if you attempt to run certain applications (i.e. 3DMark 2000) you will need to reboot your system. ATi is actually making good headway on their 2K drivers. Their NT drivers are among the best, so I have no reason to believe their 2k quality will be poor. Win 9x quality is also fairly decent, but is quite poor if you are looking at an AFR card like the MAXX. One word of caution though. The beta's on ATi's site are "extremely beta." It might cause spontaneous reboots, etc. The flaws are fairly critical, however they aren't too difficult to correct and the final drivers should be in decent shape. Realistically, the best drivers for 2k have come from NVidia, however since so many manufacturers use NVidia chipsets, the results have been spotty for some people. Personally, I think ATi and Matrox provide the best solutions because they do the whole package from silicon, to boards, drivers, etc. Also, unless a new video card is a critical necessity, I would wait for the Rage6, or NV15. [This message has been edited by DrSchmoe (edited 26 March 2000).]

Yes, this particular thread is always an adventure. It will make you laugh, cry, fall in love, and be glad to be alive. Tune in for next week's all new episode! I know that a lot of magazine columnists read this board. I wonder what they are thinking right now Quote: Originally posted by Andy_25: God, I just noticed this thread for the first time! I have to say I haven't laughed so much in ages.... LOL Can't wait what happens next.

Congrats being 16, it is the best time of your life! Enjoy it while it lasts! (seriously, not trying to be an arse) Just a note, it isn't polite to brag about how much money you make. The average salary in the Bay Area for an entry to mid-level programmer is $7000/mo. I am also positive there are people on this board making $600/day. I understand you are young, but you aren't about to woo people throwing dollar signs around. I would guess two thirds of this board is probably college age and younger, and the last third are working folk in the IT business (ie. making good money).

I wonder if he can give advice regarding the deployment of my Win2K Advanced Server cluster??? What is the minimum number of nodes I should have for SQL-7 failover and still maintain 99.99% uptime, including allowed outages for maintenence, etc? What should I do about upstream planning, so that I have at least 20Mbps avaiable at any given time? What about Active Directory deployment? Any insights? Thousands of dollars since 1992. I am in awe. Ooooohhh. Sorry, couldn't resist. I know I am an evil, evil person.

This is the DMA buffer problem that I mentioned previously. You can resort to the standard Win2K drivers, or wait it out till it gets fixed. However, this might actually be an MS problem, not a Creative issue. I am assuming it will be fixed in LiveWare 4.

HA! This was a good read before bed Reminds me of that old tech support tale about NOSMOKE.EXE.

I am guessing Creative has a legitimate reason why they didn't include the applet to change max number of voices. I am wondering what that reason is In any event, I am not sure that it isn't a DMA buffer problem. Individual applications should be able to specify their own number of accelerated streams, and bypass the system default. Does this same problem still exist when you switch to 2 speakers? I haven't started testing, but I am guessing that two speaker mode might reduce the effects of the buffer issue (Which might actually be more of an over-run scenario). If Creative set the DMA buffer size too low, many concurrent sound effects could be overwriting one-another and causing the problem.

Well, I wish I could be of more help, but in order for me to better diagnose what happens, I would have to install the hacked LW3, and monitor what gets messed up. In the event I couldn't determine the problem, I would be in your situation Which gives me a quick idea. Did you reenable "map through this device?" My guess is that older settings may still persist. It depends largely if 2K considers LW2k the same device as LW3. If you haven't already done so, I would follow the instructions for hacked LW 3, but run through them in reverse. You might have missed something when you were house cleaning. After I got the retail packaging, I blew away the old OS and made it a policy not to install any beta drivers. For this reason, I bypassed the leaked creative drivers (I used them before the reinstall), and the beta Rage 128 drivers. I would highly recommend adopting a similar policy. Part of the reason we are using Win2K is for its stability, and "pushing the envelope" with beta drivers can pretty much make moot any advantage gained from Win2k. I am sure some people disagree with me, but I come from a "mission-critical" background, so that mindset is also reflected on how I treat my home computer.

Thanks! I am fairly impressed with the drivers so far. Sure I miss the applets from LiveWare 3, but I really don't care *that* much. For the most part they just looked cooler than the previous versions. The drivers are EAX 2.0 compatible, so as far as features go, we are on par with 9x users. It sounds like some people are still having problems with LW2k, which is interesting. My guess is that they tried the hacked version of LW3. Look at it this way. Now that Windows2K is officially supported by Creative, they can't hang up on you when you call for support

The reason it takes longer to load could be due to the SoundFont. Try disabling the SoundFont and see if your speed is boosted. My guess is that the default.sf2 file ended up getting badly fragmented during the install, or, you are loading a larger SoundFont. Also, the volume is regulated by devldr32.exe. The problem is that devldr32.exe is a user process and loads after the startup sound, hence the loud volume. If it were run as a system service, this might correct the issue. However, tampering with devldr32 can cause your system to die a multitude of deaths (i.e. proceed at your own risk). As for the drivers, they are different. The release version has been signed by Microsoft's hardware labs. However, a DMA problem that would flush the buffers still remains. I previously thought it had been removed, but after further testing, it remains. I don't have the time, but I am guessing it would be fairly simple to hack the LiveWare 3 utilites to work with the WDM drivers (after all, they work in NT4). I wouldn't worry about it though, my guess is that LiveWare 4 is right around the corner, and Creative didn't want to release two versions within weeks of each other. [This message has been edited by DrSchmoe (edited 23 March 2000).]

Mail your spare kidney to: Bill Gates C/O Microsoft One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052-6399 NOTE: This is called sarcasm. DrSchmoe should not be held liable in the event that someone does send a kidney to Bill Gates.

They never said "mid-March." If you look at their home page, it says "March." You have 13 days left. Be patient. The betas, as well as the Dell drivers were in good shape, I have no reason to believe they will miss the deadline. http://www.americas.creative.com/win2k.html

After reading this post, I think my IQ fell a perceptible amount.

No, there is no performace difference. The only thing ACPI really adds, is a more advanced form of Plug and Play, and power management. If you want more performance, buy a faster processor

Well, according to Windows help... "If the Hibernate tab is not available, your computer does not support this feature." I wish I knew why, but I am guessing it is just a partition problem. You might want to root around the MS Knowledgebase. Oh well, at least I gave it a stab. As for your page file, I can't really say. Too large a page file can actually slow things down, which is why I don't recommend one too much larger than your physical memory. You can run defrag, and the report will tell you the number of fragments. Preferably, it should be "0."

Watch out mr_yellow. Next, they will try to stone you =)

Rulle: How much RAM do you have? How much space is free on your boot drive? If you have 384MB, RAM for instance, you need 384MB of free space on your boot drive. Maybe you are running out of space? Another alternative is to run your page file off a different partition. The other thing could be that the space needs to be contiguous (I am not sure). Defrag your drive, and then try. You may need to defrag the page file, either use Diskeeper, or shrink the pagefile, defrag, and return the page file to its original size. Which brings me to a general page file tip... Make sure your minimum and maximum page file sizes are the same. This prevents resizing of the page file, and removes the possibility that the page file could fragment. I usually recommend a page file size equal to the next increment above your physical memory (ie, 128MB RAM = 192MB page file, 192MB RAM = 256MB page file, etc). Oops, almost forgot. There were some problems with ABIT boards and ACPI, but all those issues are resolved in the latest BIOS revisions. [This message has been edited by DrSchmoe (edited 05 March 2000).]

To enable hibernate support, goto the "Power options" Control Panel. Goto the hibernate tab, and check the box. Silent-IQ: Sorry I didn't respond sooner, if your machine detects MPS support, it probably can't go to ACPI. Enabling ACPI would render the system unbootable, which is I guess what happened. ACPI machines can be switched to MPS, but not vice-versa. Also, if you are running in MPS mode, or even as a "Standard PC" you are missing some power management features. You can get these features back by going to the Add Hardware control panel. 1. "Add/troubleshoot" 2. click "Add a new device" and hit next. 3. Select "No" 4. Scroll down to NT APM/Legacy support, and add it. This will enable "soft-off," suspend, and some other features that otherwise are disabled without ACPI. [This message has been edited by DrSchmoe (edited 04 March 2000).]

When I first got my system, my Live experienced a weird problem and it might have been the same one. It was almost like the hardware refused to output to the correct speaker configuration. I can't really remember, but this is what I did to fix it. My solution was to: Remove the card boot install the card (can't remember if I used the same slot) boot again After all the swapping, I managed to get the proper speaker config back. I had assumed it might be a problem with the config data stored in the Live's NVRAM. It was a wild guess, but something on board had to have become corrupted (with the assumption that a new install reverts to defaults). A second possiblilty is that the drivers had become hoplessly messed up, and that particular instance of my live was corrupt. When I reinstalled, the drivers must have thought it was a totally different card, and defaulted their settings. Either way, it worked. Sorry I didn't post earlier, but it was a long time ago and it just came back to me.

I am not sure if I fully understand what happened, but here are a few other suggestions. Do you have any other systems with the Win2K Administrative tools? You might be able to connect to the computer remotely and log in using the local-admin account. You would need to configure your local user accounts by using the "computer management" applet or the NT4 user manager. Do you have your Emergency Repair Disk? You could restore the user portion of the registry. Another alternative might be to enter the recovery console (boot from the CD) and attempt to repair from there. Although, I am not totally certain what tools are available in repair mode. I have only used the console for file troubles. I am not sure if there are any user-tools..... And in the worst case scenario, you need to reinstall.

@Home support did this???? What the heck were they thinking? Anyway, you can still get into your system with the local administrator account. If you hit the "options" button, it should expand so you can see a drop down list of "domains." Select the domain name that matches your computer. Then enter the "administrator" for the username, and whatever password you specified during setup (if any). Generally, since you are using @Home, if you don't already have an Administrator password, I would recommend that you set one. From there, you should be able to log in and get to "My Computer," right click and select "properties" and then go to the "Network Identification" tab. You can then pull up the properties and remove the domain.

ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) is the new form of plug and play, which includes support for multiple processors. It is more advanced, and generally the system functions with better integration. And, as the name implies, it allows for more robust power management. MPS is a legacy form of multi-processor support that was sort of kludged together. The technology isn't associated with PnP, and it is more of a "refit." There are two types of MPS, 1.1 and 1.4. System management is almost a little sloppy. MPS creates a whole slew of virtual resources, so for instance, in an MPS system, your system might appear to have 128 IRQs. If your board supports it, ACPI is the preferred method (generally 440BX and later).

Actually, you can go between dual and single CPU mode "at will." If you go into the device manager, under the computer section, you will see what type of machine you have (either ACPI, or MPS). From there, you can "update driver" and change to either multi, or uniprocessor, depending on your current need (stick to the same type, ACPI, or MPS). NT4 required you to reinstall their OS, but fortunately MS recognized that some people add additional processors at a latter date.