BladeRunner

That was Socket 423 and was actually a lot larger than the newer Socket 478. Willamette CPU's were available in both socet configurations. I also disagree with them being described as garbage. I owned a 1.8Ghz Willamette (soon to be passed on to my girlfriend) and I felt it performed great. It's not as if I went into the purchase of that blindly, AMD was an option for me at the time and cheaper to boot - I just prefer (in my opinion) the Intel stability.

I honestly feel that if this was possible we would have a motherboard that allows you to do it by now. It seems unlikely that an Intel chipset would support such a setup as said above, they would be cutting their own throat by making a rival product to their premium line (dual Xeon). SIS, VIA, ServerWorks would be the sensible thought, but the fact that Northwood has been around for ages and no chipset nor talk of a dual P4 setup has been bantered around would certainly lead me to believe it is disabled at the chip level - like HT on all P4's below 3Ghz.

and they make up what, 2% of all PC buyers? Doubt the figure is even that high. The majority of people realise that 2Ghz+ is alread more than enough processing power for the majority of the work they do.

Well that is the very reason why Intel didn't do it. Dual P4 setup's would eat directly into their own dual Xeon market. Lets be honest, a couple of Northwood B's are not going to be as fast as some of the Xeon setup's but would probably be cheaper and a lot of people would take that option. The other was a turn around by Intel on what the home/general user actually needs. The P3's were SMP aware aalthough the average users wasn't interested. There is so very little software out there that can actually make use of a dual-CPU setup. So Intel's focus changed to getting the fastest possible processors out there and pushing that to their high-end users rather than dual. Most average users thought that two CPU's gave double the performance etc. Intel also feel that if you have the real need for dual CPU's then you probably wont mind spending the extra on the Xeon.

In my eyes this game is totaly Win2k/XP NOT compatible. No matter what I tried it simply would not go. As soon as you try to run it you simply get the message "Not supported under Windows NT" and that is as far as it goes. My "fix" was to play Carmagrddon TDR2000 instead which incedently you should be able to pick-up at a bargain price as it's quite old now.

As the previous post said, you could try swapping the power boards over. However it all depends on just how valuable the data on this drive is. Because if attempting to swap the power boards over fails there is a good chance you'll do even more damage to the unit. There is a very good reason why companies charge so much to recover data in this situation. The platters are physically removed from the drive and placed into basically a new HD shell. This is certainly not something that should be attempted in ones bedroom - a very clean room is the only way this can be done, hence the charge. If you feel the data is expendable then go for it, give it a shot and you may be lucky, saving $800 to boot. However if it doesn't go according to plan then not even spending $800 is going to get your data back.

What does the Event Log have to say about these unexpected shut-down's?

Nope, afraid not. They will never exist as the current P4 CPU's are not SMP aware - they simply cannot be used in dual set-up's. If this will change with the release of Prescot or future "desktop Pentiums" we'll just have to wait and see.

Oh LOL You thought it was Office XP SP3? I guess I really should have gone backto what I was first taught when I entered the world of computers - always ask the simple questions first. Didn't think to ask if you were running the correct version of Office So, you have got your PC plugged in right?

You're already running SP2? Unlike Windows SP when it comes to office you have to install each SP in turn. E.g You cannot patch from Office2k, or Office2k SP1 to SP3. You need to be running Office2k SP2 to upgrade to SP3.

Legal copy of Office?

You haven't said what country you are in, so that makes giving you a list of vendors a little bit difficult. May I suggest using a good old search engine. I just searched for "Ditto Max 10gb tape" under google.com and got hundreds of hits. A few seconds later I was at this link: http://www.zipstorage.com/segtapdriv.html Hope that helps.

It's quite safe to assume that as long as you're not using any old legacy cards (ISA) and your PCI/AGP cards are no more than about two years old then you're going to have fully ACPI complient hardware. Add in a fully ACPI complient motherboard/BIOS (Older motherbaords that claimed ACPI were lying, they didn't follow the specifications correctly) and a fully ACPI OS (Win2k & WinXP) and you're ready to go. ACPI was released so silently, a Wintel invention and one that has made building and managing computers so much easier. Forget faster CPU's, easier to use OS interfaces - ACPI has been quite porbably the single most useful invention for computers in years yet really hasn't been hyped and people are always trying to circumvent it :-/

Actually that is not true. Excite like Hotmail and the like periodically delete e-mail addresses that are no longer in use. I believe that with Hotmail that happens after three months of a mailbox being inactive (nobody logging in to it). So, although you created a new address, there is a possability that somebody had that address ages ago, Excite cleaned up the database and you then re-created it. Although you have to ask what are the chances of you creating an e-mail that has been removed from their database that somebody else once owned who just happened to have used that address to register here - I'm sure somebody with a better mathmatical head on their shoudlers can tell me that one

*Nods* And even that site shows it is only the 3.06Ghz P4 which is HT enabled, nothing about the slower CPU's. It's a nice enough idea and I'm sure it will take off - so long as none HT enhanced programs do not take a perfromance hit then I'm sure it will be a good selling point. Although I do feel that anybody jumping onto the HT bandwagon at the moment (spending all that money on a 3.06Ghz at release) has far more money than they need.

OK people, there seems to be a real lack of knowledge here about HT and what you need to enable it. Number one on this list is a CPU that can have HT enabled. This is the 3.06Ghz ONLY. "But the link at the top, they said......." No, they are using an ES (Engineering Sample) version of the CPU, this is not something you can go and pick up from your local vendor. Take a look here: http://www.vrforums.com/showthread.php?threadid=5525 Now I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but here it is: The current Northwood A & B CPU's (with the exception of the 3.06Ghz) CANNOT have HT unlocked. It is burnt on the die (like the 486sx CPU was the same as the 486DX CPU with traces broken). The three things you need to have a HT enabled system are as follows: 1. A chipset that supports HT, numerous ones do and anything released now will. 2. A BIOS that enables HT, using the list of HT compatible chipsets, a lot of BIOS upgrades will be released that enable HT. 3. A CPU that has HT enabled, currently only the 3.06Ghz - lower frequency CPU's may have them IF Intel decide to manufacture them, which seems unlikely (Like when they released Northwood they released a 1.6Ghz Northwood even though they were already up to 2Ghz). This is the only way to get HT. Current Northwood A's and B's will not be HT enabled.

Total disagreement. "Most people who own P4's at home overclock" What rubbish, a few hardcore enthusiasts and those that must just get a few more points on their favourite benchmark do, but the majority? No way. The SIS chipsets have historically not been as good overclockers as the Intel ones anyway - however past experiences is of course no guarantee that new chipsets will be equally as bad.

Sorry, don't believe those results. Norton has been tested again and again and in many tests picks up virus that other scanners do not. I shall continue to harp on about Norton/Symantec anti-virus until the day either my home systems or my work network get infected with a virus due to the software not picking it up - then I'd be able to say how bad it is. However as my home systems have never been infected and my work network has been clean since the deployment of Symantec AV 7.5 I think I shall continue to recommend it to all.

Oh, what did you get instead of the Promise controller then? Cause if it was the Highpoint one....well....ok, suppose some people like to do downgrades on their systems, I tend to upgrade - far more fun. Lets see, Promise Fasttrak 100 with 4 HD's in RAID 0+1. Almost as fast as a standard RAID 0 array (The Highpoint's cannot cope with 0+1 without taking a massive performance hit) and all under 6% CPU utilisation. Early warning system from the Fasttrak software is excellent, warned me on an iminent HD failure (My first and only IBM fail) and enabled me to have a replacement ready to go. Promise controllers still cost about twice as much as the Highpoint's and they do so for a reason, you are paying for quality. System crashes and data loss - me thinks you had other problems, we are currently trusting two servers at work to RAID 0+1 on Promise controllers and both have been running for 12+ months without a single problem. Promise RAID controllers - beautiful piece of kit, the only upgrade I would consider would be too an expensive true hardware solution, however 6% CPU utilisation is excellent for soemthing software based.

You might want to try sending Promise Tech support an e-mail. I've had dealings with them in the past (Issues with a TX4 RAID controller) and they have always been very helpful - they actually do know what they are talking about.

Ah yes, I am running the Promise drivers rather than those included in WinXP. For the TX2 RAID controller these are 2.0.0.26

Windows XP doesn't have a problem with modems at all. Rather it has a problem (as did Win2k) with certain devices that are simply not compatible. Have you checked on the official compatability list to make sure this modem is WinXP compatible? If you go along to Compaq's web site (all part of HP now) and enter the serial number I believe you get a list of downloads specifically for that machine, maybe a WinXP modem driver listed? If it's not a modem that came with the Compaq originally what make/model is it?

In that situation I've always gone for: Primary Master: Main HD Primary Slave: Second HD Secondary Master: CD-ROM / DVD-ROM Secondary Slave: CD-RW Currently because of RAID controllers I'm able to hang all the HD's off of the RAID controller and my DVD-ROM & CD-RW each get Master on their own IDE channel. So like you it's been a while since I've had to think about running four devices off of on-board controllers

I'm using a Promise Fasttrak TX2 RAID Controller. My CPU utilisation is around 6-6.5%. http://www.prawlings.net/benchmarks/hdtach.htm The above link is with HDTach 2.52 but 2.61 reported the same. Maybe it is an issue with the standard Promise IDE controllers rather than the RAID ones.

Hello, I think you are getting a little bit confused by the drivers page. At the very top it says something about "Windows XP Compatability" however underneath is a link to all the WinME files. Anyway, as a temporary solution I've uploaded the file onto my web space for you. It wont stay here for ever, so if you can send me a message once you've got it I'd appreciate it (mainly because I'm sure the HP license agreement probably says I'm not allowed to host it). www.prawlings.net/files/hp/epat150.exe This will dowload a 275k file, it is a self extracting file, simply run it and it will launch the setup program. Here is the readme from the page where I downloaded these drivers from: This download includes new parallel port drivers for Windows Me. Verify the CD-Writer is attached to the computer and powered on before installing the new drivers. Re-installation of the original software is not necessary. The new driver files will allow the HP CD-Writer Plus parallel port drive to be recognized in Windows Me. Windows Me was tested with Easy CD Creator ver. 3.5c and Direct CD ver. 2.5d. If you are not currently running at least these versions of software, please update your software to these versions. Get the thing recognised and running, then we'll worry about firmware.