JediBaron

The only real problem with Via is the 133 chipsets don't get along with Nvidia. Nvidia has promised to fix the problem. Other than that though the Via chipsets do a great job.

Well boys and girls, after endless tinkering with my new A7V system, I've finally achieved 100% stability in all programs. I'm able to run all my games without any Geforce lockups. Just thought some people would like to know how to achieve this miraculous feat. Well basically I used to have all kinds of probs with the video, so I tediously went through the Nvidia reference drivers until I got a stable one. ver 6.xx was fast with nice tweeks, but couldn't run stable in any game for very long. ver 5.xx had even less stability (the ver's that would let my computer boot that is). Finally rested on Nvidia Ver.3.81. I also have an ASUS v6600 SGRAM board and I flashed it with the sba enabled bios off their site. I then went into the BIOS and set AGP Fast Writes to off. NOTE: I also set my performance setting to 'Normal'. I'm not really sure if this is necessary, but I figured: 'what the heck?' I suggest that you can try with it both on and off if you want - myself, I see no reason, everything's plenty fast right now. After all that, went into my games, and BOOM! stability rocks. The only game that suffered in performance was UT. In D3d it ran slow as all hell. I went into the OpenGl ini file and set the default settings to the Nvidia AGP settings and then switched the video mode over to OpenGl. Ran like a dream after that, and I turned up all the quality settings . It only has one small visible distortion - the smoke trail is dark when firing the rocket launcher with secondary fire. This effect only happens for a second and is completely liveable. Here's my system: Operating System: Windows 2000 Pro sp1 (running fully PNP w/ ACPI) Processor: AMD K7 T-Bird 800 w/ 256 Megs PC133 Motherboard: Asus K7a (1004 BIOS) w/ the newest Via 4 in 1 Hard Drive: Seagate 15Gig UDMA66 7200rpm (formatted in NTFS 5) Video: Asus 6600 SGRAM w/ Asus sba bios (AGP Geforce 256,32meg - Nvidia drivers v3.81) Sound: SB 128 PCI (Win2k default drivers - damn Creative!) Modem: USR 56K PCI Network: NETGEAR FA310TX Fast Ethernet Adapter (PCI 10/100 card) DVD Decoder: Creative DXR3 Dvd Decoder (w/Creative beta Win2k drivers - fixed by me ) SCSI: PCI Advansys SCSI Host Adapter CD Burner: Smart&Friendly 4x SCSI Printer: Epson Stylus 740 (USB) Scanner: UMAX Astra 1220U (USB) Misc: Creative PC-DVD 5X drive, USB Intellimouse Optical w/ intellipoint 3.2 (ver. 3.20.0.484), Gravis Xterminator gamepad with the new no-bsod driver that Gravis tech has me beta testing - thanks dude the drivers finally rock! ) DirectX: 8.0 (4.08.00.0146) Games I'm currently running: (with no probs now) Half-Life w/ Counter-Strike beta 7.0 Quake 2 and 3 Unreal Tournament X-Wing Alliance Earth 2150 C&C Red Alert & Tiberian Sun

???? I've never heard of anyone having a prob with it . . . I'm running it without any probs

Now that's not true The virus scanner is nice as long as you install it as a seperate app of course. (Norton integration blows goats) Norton has a nice registry editor too (when you can get it to work that is)

Same here - now that I have it stable. My machine hasn't been rebooted in 5 days and counting. Even with all the gameplaying and stuff. <I know, I know, I'm just too proud of my self - hehe>

True, it was a lot of effort. But I'm not one to let Chipzilla win me over. It's not AMD's fault that Via & Nvidia don't get along (specially with Win2k). I fully expect that one of the 2 will fix the problem eventually. In other words - "Keep the faith!"

I just installed mine again and had absolutely no probs. First run the app compatible tool. Select Win98 from the compatibility options. Then hit the browse and go to the c&c cd and select setup under the win95 install directory. Then hit OK to run the tool. Now let it sit for a sec. The app compatibility tool will crash and you need to use ctrl-alt-delete and kill it. But after you kill it, c&c setup will start and run, no problem. Later [This message has been edited by JediBaron (edited 26 August 2000).]

I fixed the Dxr3 beta drivers from Creative and posted the instructions under the Hardware section of this site. Works perfect with none of the device startup errors that the Hollywood drivers cause. Well that's odd - I was going to tell you what page it was on, but I can't seem to find it. It's not under 'C' for Creative or 'D' for Dxr3 - humm. I know it was up on the 'What's new' page before, but I don't know where it got put after that. Well I did find the thread about it: http://www.ntcompatible.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/003146.html

Well after doing a quick lookup of your modem I find that it is an Lucent modem manufactured by Aztech. Are you using the latest Lucent driver version? See Lucent modems are software modems and they rely on a driver to interpret normal phone commands from the system and change them into the actual tones on the phone line. Lots of times what happens is something in this driver messes up. When that happens you normally have to just simply remove your modem from the modem control panel and reboot. Then Windows will reinstall the modem and write over the current files and reinitialize any possible support files that it may be using

I have a the V770-32, just the non-ultra. I also work just fine in Win2k. The 6.13 drivers rock my card, though. But I also flashed my card with the NVidia reference bios. After I did that, I got an extra 5% performance boost across the board. So if you know anything about BIOS upgrading, I'd highly recommend it. Good Luck

Yeah, and try out the new Detinator 3 drivers - they f**king ROCK

Same here. SP1 fixed my sticky key problems in AvP. I would have kept SP1 around but it did a horrible number on my CS so I had to uninstall it

Dude, I spent over a week trying to fix the problem. I had no choice but to uninstall if I wanted to play. The no-servers thing was livable with Gamespy, but the framerate problems in OpenGL were too much to take. I have a Geforce 256. The only thing I didn't try was the new 6.13 drivers (Detinator 3). If you have a TNT/Geforce card you might want to try these drivers as a fix. Good Luck

No, no - the Microsoft Compatibility Update patch fixed that problem. Just download it from their update site.

Hey bud, your BIOS version is really old Upgrade your BIOS to 1007c - that should help you A LOT! I had all kinds of probs with the old BIOS. Got it all working with the new one though.

Yeah, I've been trying to work through the TCP/IP probs that I'm having with the game after sp1, but no go. I can't get a list of servers, I have to tweak my video drivers to get into any game, and I still have probs connecting and with ping speed. It seems that after sp1, Half-Life netcode can no longer keep the correct timing on a connection between you and the server. It does a really interesting thing with frame rates - they bounce between 30 and 60, but spend very little at any other rates. I liked the update cause it fixed a couple of my probs, but without stable, fast CS life just has no meaning - hehe no more sp1 til Half-Life updates again

Try this: Go into the Device Manager and remove the 2nd HD from the list of drives. Then reboot and let win2k identify it again.

So far, so good. Everything worked fine except Half-Life wouldn't connect to any servers. I had to reinstall my Detonator drivers again for my TNT2 card and Half-Life was back to normal . I have taken note of some of the fixes so far: (1) When trying to play Alien vs. Preditor my buttons would stay active. This has been referred to as the sticky key problem. After the update, the game worked perfectly. (2) After installing the Detonator 5.32 drivers again on my TNT2, I no longer have to use the registry fix to get Q2 running in OpenGL. I think the reason that the driver installs those registry keys is because NVidia probably made them on a machine with a pre-release of sp1. So that's all good now. (3) Also, my PC Anywhere 8 started giving me a warning on boot up. It appears that it was supposed to do that before, but never did. Still worked though, even with the warning. I installed 9.2 and there's no more warning. Anyone noticed any other successful fixes? I've heard that some people had to uninstall and reinstall their TCP/IP. I did that just for good measure, but I didn't really have any problem.

The 503+ motherboard does not have UDMA 66. Sorry dude. You will get the best possible speeds from the drive by using the setting the drive type to 'auto' and speed to 'auto'. Enable all the other drive settings to all 'auto' also and set SMART to 'enabled' You can also get the drive to go a little faster if it's the only drive on the first chain. Put your CD rom as a slave on the second chain. If you have a CD-R or another HD put that as master on the second chain. (If you have 4 drives then you just have to make do) BTW - Don't worry about what the Win2k device manager says. If you set the BIOS setting as above then Win2k will be using the fastest settings by default. In other words - just let Win2k do it's job. Any modifications that you make to the default settings will assuredly only hurt your performance, not help it. [This message has been edited by JediBaron (edited 28 July 2000).]

Sorry bud, But brand new memory does not mean good memory You should definately try replacing it and then let us know

I have just about the same config as you. If you're having that many errors its due to a hardware problem and 9 times out of 10 it is a memory problem. Try different memory or if your running at 133mhz, try turning it down to 100. One last note, installing any OS with bad memory problems can cause all kinds of havoc with the system. Basically files corrupt as they pass through memory on the way to the hard drive. If you find that it is the memory, you should reinstall after you fix the problem just to be on the safe side.

I'm no sure why your having problems. I have a 4X Smart & Friendly SCSI writer w/ Adaptec 4.02 and I can burn CDs MUCH better in Win2k. In win98 every little f**king thing would make the buffer underrun and screw up my CDs. In Win2k, I've never had a buffer underrun and I do all kinds of 'dangerous' stuff while writing. I copy files, run internet progs, and even play 3D online games This rocks, if I touched anything in my win2k . . . scratch that CD! I do have a suggestion for adrianhall, though. If you are using a SCSI drive then you do not need any ASPI drivers. The ASPI drivers make non-SCSI devices (ie IDE writers) look like SCSI devices. Windows talks to the ASPI layer as if it's talking to a SCSI device and the ASPI layer then gets those commands to the SCSI device over whatever protical it's really on (ie IDE or LPT). So your problem is definately not in those drivers.

This is one of the known flaws in Win2k, Basically, it doesn't like sharing the com port interrupts. Normally Com 1 & 3 share and Com 2 & 4 share interupts to work. Win2k doesn't like this for some reason. To get mine to work I put it on Com2 and disabled my onboard Com2 port. Is your modem set up for pnp? Try setting the jumpers to pnp and maybe win2k will move it to a different interrupt. Otherwise your going to have to go into your bios and set another interupt (probably 5) to be used by ISA cards. And then have the motherboard identify it again (with pnp on the card) Hope that helps - later

After the crappy release of Creative's Dxr3 Win2000 drivers, I was rather discouraged that I would ever get my DVD running outside of the NT4 drivers with beta Hollywood drivers. Well today I finally decided to experiment with them and I figured out how to get them to work. First thing is to install and then remove the NT4 drivers. I'm not sure how neccesary this step is, but I did it just to make sure I'd have the registry entries for the Creative DVD player. You'll have to reboot after that. Second thing - using the Win2k device manager install the Creative Win2k Beta drivers. (you'll have to reboot again) Now as all of us know who tried this driver when it came out, this now completely f**ks up the media player. So what you have to do next is literally 'break' the Win2k supported drivers. That's the device that allows Win2k to play DVD's natively. You do this by running the registry editor. Search all the data values for 'dxr3'. Now in my registry this was the first one. A classid key with 4 parameters: default= . . . CLSID= . . . FilterData= . . . FriendlyName='Creative Labs Encore Dxr3 Filter' Just delete the entire key with all 4 parameters. This will fix the media player (you can verify by trying a couple of mpeg movies in it) Lastly, just install the Creative PC-DVD Player. The autocalibrate doesn't work right anymore, but you can just manually adjust it to get your screen right. Well, that's it. I'm now running DVD's without any adverse affects using the Creative drivers. If anyone needs the driver package please let me know and I can ICQ or email it to you

Well, from all my monkeying around on my other system with the drivers. I can say with a 99.9% confidence rate that it would make absolutely no difference at all. The NT4 drivers don't react at all with Win2k drivers. They simply manually add all the registry entries and then manually copy all of the driver files into the system32 and system32/drivers directories. The NT4 drivers never interact with Win2k or the Dxr3 card at all. Win2k will not even run them. They simply just add the registry entries so that the Creative DVD player's install program thinks that the dxr3 is installed. The card is actually run by the Win2k driver. But you MUST install the Win2k drivers after the NT4 drivers because many of the file names are the same and the Win2k driver can not run with the NT4 files as they don't work at all in Win2k (as I said above, win2k is unable to run them at all). PS: Actually I should rephrase that. The actual driver files (the *.drv files in the system32/drivers directory) for NT4 will run in Win2k as they are nearly the same files. The files that don't work are the dll's and support drivers in the system32 directory. Those are the ones that have to be overwritten by the Win2k driver. - Just thought I should clarify that [This message has been edited by JediBaron (edited 16 July 2000).]