FlyingPenguin

Well I'd still be using 6.4 if it played all codecs, but it doesn't. Sometime around WMP 8 I ran into a wall, and trust me I tried. I was a die-har WMP 6.4 fan. No bloat, no fuss. What really sold me on BSPlayer is the dual monitor support. And my own off the cuff testing shows it using a lot less memory than WMP8 (last version of WMP I have installed) so I'm happy. But you're right, choice is good

I refuse to use any version of WMP after 6.4. Unfortunately M$ has refused to make the WMP 9 codecs compatible with older versions so 6.4 is less useful every day. Someone a few months ago turned me on to a media player called BSPlayer. It leaves WMP in the dust. It plays everything, it's got a very small memory footprint, and it supports multiple monitors properly (you can have the player controls on once display and run the player full screen on the other). I can highly recommend it. Best of all it's free: http://www.bsplayer.org/

I never burn Ghost images directly. Frankly I don't trust Norton to burn them properly. I prefer to save the images to another hard drive or partition (for clients I carry around a spare 80Gb drive just for this reason), and I use the following Ghost command line parameters to force Ghost to split all images into 699Mb files so that they can easily be burned later: ghost.exe -split=699 -auto When I do burn the image files later, I burn them using Nero and always use the verify option to insure the integrity of the data on the CDs (or DVDs).

Thanks, I'll try it! Call waiting is not important to me - if this works I'll have two dedicated lines just for the modem so that's no problem.

App description says 95 or 98 only, but it was written before Win2K. Diamond doesn't seem to be supporting it anymore and won't give me an answer. Stuck with a 26K connection here for the forseable future and need some options. My ISP supports Shotgun. Thanks...

If you run is from within Win2K it should offer you the option of Upgrading you existing installation. ------------------ --- The Flying Penguin http://voodooextreme.com/flypenguin

More ram is always better, but it depends what you use it for. If you never run more than one program at a time, you don't really need more than 128 Mb. More ram lets you run multiple applications without slowing down. If you're like me, and like to leave several apps running and many windows open on the desktop, you'll notice snappier performance with more memory. Memory intensive apps like Photoshop will also run much smoother. Win2K and NT 4 are also memory hogs compared to Win9x. Minimum for these two operating systems for serious gaming or professional apps is 192 Mb in my opinion. You will NOT see more framerates, generally, with more ram (depends on the game). Ram helps indirectly because it prevents disk thrashing - this is when the OS moves data stored in RAM temporarily to the swap file (or paging file for Win2K/NT) when it runs low on RAM. I've been told Q3A is a memory hog and does slightly improve in performance with more RAM, but I can't confirm that. ------------------ --- The Flying Penguin http://voodooextreme.com/flypenguin [This message has been edited by FlyingPenguin (edited 23 February 2000).]

Could be an IRQ Channel sharing conflict (AGP shares an IRQ with one PCI slot). Pull all the cards out of the system and see if it still does it. If not install them one by one until you find the culprit. You may have to move it to another slot. More info here: http://voodooextreme.com/flypenguin/glfaq5.htm#5_9 ------------------ --- The Flying Penguin http://voodooextreme.com/flypenguin

WADSY: Disable IRQ Steering. I know this is necessary for SBLIve and probably for MX300 also. SBLive and MX300 both are prone to PCI IRQ Channel Sharing problems. If disabling IRQ Sharing doesn't work, you may have to relocate the sound card. Go here for details: http://voodooextreme.com/flypenguin/glfaq5.htm#5_9 ------------------ --- The Flying Penguin http://voodooextreme.com/flypenguin

HardOCP got a hold of them: http://www.hardocp.com/news_images/2000/february_2000/2-22-00bv2-w2k-driver.html Okay, here's the story. All they do is add multimon functionality and D3D (although you don't need two monitors - at least not under Glide, maybe you do under D3D which would suck). It doesn't install new Glide files (it uses whatever Glide files you already have installed) so there's no performance improvement that I can detect in Glide. It does add D3D drivers, if that's important to you. Can't test that - I don't have any D3D games on my Win2K system, just Q2. You also lose the standard V2 control panel which means no gamma or refresh settings. Can't see the point in installing this unless you need D3D. No instructions, and I found the only way to install them is to update the V2 driver in Device Manager, click on "Select the best driver..." in the driver wizard, browse to the the path you've extracted the driver, and select "Use another driver" and pick the one listed with the path to the new driver. ------------------ --- The Flying Penguin http://voodooextreme.com/flypenguin [This message has been edited by FlyingPenguin (edited 23 February 2000).]

The "ahem" non-time bombed versions don't include some misc files. Nothing necessary though. Some versions are also missing the Installation disk creation utility, but you can find that by doing an FTP search, or just check the newsgroups (probably mentioned here somewhere too). ------------------ --- The Flying Penguin http://voodooextreme.com/flypenguin

TWeak UI works with Win9x, NT, and Win2K just fine. There is no special version for Win2K that I'm aware of. I have it installed right now under Win2K. I like to have my Favorites folder relocated to a data partition for easy system backups. ------------------ --- The Flying Penguin http://voodooextreme.com/flypenguin [This message has been edited by FlyingPenguin (edited 21 February 2000).]

Thanks. Pretty much the conclusion I'd come to. I'll stick to using the TNT1 on this box until I upgrade my main system - then I'll have a V3 to hand down to it. ------------------ --- The Flying Penguin http://voodooextreme.com/flypenguin

Anyone having this problem with V2 under Win2K? I seem to be framerate capped at 40fps. It's a P2-300 w/12Mb V2. Under NT 4 or Win98 on the same system I can easily get 70-75 fps in Q2 using the Brian Hook standard timedemo w/Vsync disabled. Nothing I can do will increase fps in Win2K over 40 fps - even lowering res to 512x384 and turning down all eye candy. Oh, and just for grins, I temporarily installed a second card for SLI and I still get 40 fps - so it's definately an artificial fps cap. Now I've seen this before in NT 4 if you mix driver file versions. I've taken the precaution though of manually deleting all V2 driver files (I'm an old hand at this - I definately purged them all) and deleted the driver entries and .inf files. I've tried 2/1/99 NT drivers with the hacked inf file from this site, and I've tried several others. They all do it. I'm stumped. Right now I'm forced to use a TNT1 (you know something's wrong when I can get 60 fps out of a TNT1 and only 40 out of a V2). The card's good - I have NT 4 in a seperate partition on this system and I get 72 fps in there. I've also swapped the card for another for good measure. This Win2K installation was upgraded from Win98 - and no, a clean install is out of the question. This is a test bed system, and the whole point is I'm trying to assess Win2K's upgrade abilities. Except for this one problem Win2K is running flawlessly. It's really puzzling. Any suggestions appreciated... ------------------ --- The Flying Penguin http://voodooextreme.com/flypenguin [This message has been edited by FlyingPenguin (edited 20 February 2000).] [This message has been edited by FlyingPenguin (edited 20 February 2000).]

Keep some things in mind: - The ping reported by Quake games is not a true ping, it's an estimate. many factors can change the value and yet it effectively performs the same. - Winmodems suck because they rely on a program running on the computer to operate them (unlike a regular modem which is standalone and requires nothing from the CPU). Could be that under Win2K the driver/app isn't optimized. ------------------ --- The Flying Penguin http://voodooextreme.com/flypenguin