pmistry

Max Payne was OK, but lacked longevity. ID games have longevity there are still a lot of people that play Quake 2 and even Quake. Also the original Doom community is stronger than ever. www.doomworld.com People still make WADS. I hate Half-Life, I don't know why so many people loved it. It was just another shooter, but it does have longevity and people are addicted to that game.

Fast Writes are automatically disabled in driver releases past 2x.xx Like ThC said use NVMax or GeForce Tweak to enable them. I like RivaTuner.

I suddenly come across a loud noise from the inside of my PC. It is really loud. It has happened before and usually goes away for some reason and then comes back after a few months, but right now it is really loud and quite annoying. I tried blowing the dust off of my 2 CPU fans. I have a SLOT type processor with 2 fans attached to the heat sink. The noise seems to be coming from the CPU/Power Supply area. How else can I get rid of the noise?

the sound is like a grinding noise with an occasional high chug like a car starting up just not that loud.

CyberGenX you are correct 10 minutes is kind of silly. After reinstalling and reconfiguring and customizing my settings, and applications a couple of hours minimum have gone by. But usually I set aside a Sunday morning to get it done.

Last year was pretty dry for games, only a few outstanding titles like Max Payne. This year though, I have already had fun with Serious Sam: 2nd Encounter. I can't wait to get my hands on Jedi Knight II. Soldier of Fortune 2 looks amazing from the trailers. Doom 3 should be good too, let's hope ID makes some better gameplay refinements over Quake 2. After all Quake 2 was their last single player game. They didn't do much with RTCW. I am betting Unreal 2 will beat Doom 3's single player capability. However, I think both games are going to need some serious hardware to run. The original Unreal promised to run on current hardware and it failed. You needed a P2 back then for that game. PlanetSide might fail cuz Sony has a crappy track record for games outside of Playstation, however looks like an interesting Tribes like game. In the end though, Deus Ex 2 is what I really WANT.

Yeah I know it is easier to just reformat anyway. However I uninstalled ME to 98 once and it was running fine, if not better afterward. It is better to do this sooner rather than months later though.

Doesn't WinXP allow an uninstall procedure to drop down back to 98/98SE/ME? That is if you upgraded from 98SE.

I posted that Windows XP Constructive Criticism post a while back noting some issues I have had with XP, now things are really starting to tick me off. The ZIP support is really bothering me. I conducted a search for a file [i dislike the new search feature, too many questions], and XP insisted on searching through all my ZIPS in addition to the hard disk. While it was searching through the ZIPs CPU Usage jumps to 100%. Couldn't multitask at all, then when I tried to cancel the search, Explorer.exe crashed on me. This has happened on more than 1 occassion. Everything is so sluggish now on XP. Thinking of going back to 2K until a Service Pack is issued for XP. But my main question is how to REALLY get rid of integrated ZIP support. I tried this trick here: http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article03-202 But its results are flaky. I had to reenable ZIP support in Winrar after doing this. Seems to have an opposite effect.

Do you use any other archivers besides WinZIP? I dumped WinZIP long ago, for Winrar because I like the RAR format. Maybe I'll try WinZip and associate it for ZIPS only.

Click Options > Video > Window > 768x672 that is what I use. Or go fullscreen. This is for Jnes

However, I went ahead and downloaded Rock NES X 2.0 Beta 3, and the sound was fine. Using an SB Live! Player 1024 on Windows XP Professional.

Alot of emulators have incompatibility issues under XP. The big one is NeoRage X. I use JNes for NES emulation, it works great under XP. http://www.emulator-zone.com/nes/jnes.html

I wonder how fast XP and .NET run on that. As for the ram, I don't have a clue.

Ahhhh yes PCI video cards, my 486 has an ISA video card. It has a whopping 1 meg of memory, and it can run 640x480 resolution in an astounding 256 colors with a 60hz refresh rate. It can do 1024 but thats like asking god to put another color in the rainbow. However, its a pretty stable computer since it has an Intel 486 DX2 66 processor on an Intel chipset.

I'm a fan of Intel's engineering. The P4 processors are good processors, well designed and hard to fry. These processors are good for running apps today but will be better in the future too since not alot of software/drivers don't have complete/optimized SSE2 and other P4 improvements. Dual processors, chipset reliability are all examples of Intel design/engineering. AMD chips are fast and are good for what computing is today. If you want to run current programs as fast as possible an AMD chip is the way to go. They are also cheap. I have a love/hate relationship with VIA and their chipsets, sometimes they work flawlessly, other times you need a tweak here and there, and sometimes the chipset will cause problems even if you look at it funny. I think AMD processors would be better if they had a solid chipset manufacturer. VIA has chipsets with good features but give people problems sometimes. SiS is not the most recognizable manufacturer for chipsets and their OEM solutions like integrated video scare people from trying their products. Then there is AMD themselves whose chipsets usually lack good features, like when the original SLOT Athlon was out AMD lacked AGP4x and PC133 support.

I can't complain with Maxtor. I have had the DiamondMax 20GB ATA100 7200 RPM for 2 years now and it still runs great. Quiet and fast. I also have an old 4GB Western Digital Caviar drive and it too runs great still. I'd like to get my hands on a Seagate drive but they are near impossible to find. I haven't found a retailer here in Canada that stocks them. As for IBM disks, alot people have had problems, but some haven't, they are fast.... As for ATA133 forget it, Serial ATA is the next step up over ATA100. And yes Maxtor requires a serial/license fee for others like WD, Seagate and IBM to use ATA133.

I have setup 2 computers to connected via a crossover cable. My main PC an Athlon 750 has Windows XP Pro Corp along with a Linksys 10/100 USB Adapter connected to my cable modem, and a Dlink 530TX network card. Both are running fine using Windows XP's detected drivers. The Dlink is connected to my older PC which runs Windows 98 SE, and has a Belkin PCI adapter. Both PC's are running fine, I ran the Home Networking Wizard and both PC's can see each other and can share files. Except sometimes and only sometimes, when we copy files across the network CPU usage jumps to 100 % and I get bogged, doesn't happen to the other PC. If I run a program sometimes it will get real choppy due for some reason and task manager reports near 100 % CPU, I don't really understand why? It only happens sometimes and always with the network enabled.

Do you think that retailers will drop GeForce3 Ti200 prices down after the GF4 Ti's and MX's come out?

Yeah I don't like this whole GeForce4 MX thing. Two things for sure will happen, most computer users beginners and intermediate users will buy a GeForce4MX over other GeForce4's because of the price. Second, OEMS are going to dump these suckers into systems like anything. Just look at how many systems now come with 32 or the whopping 64 MEG GEFORCE2 cards..........GeForce2 MX that is. There are a lot of people who will think the GF4 MX is a true GF4 and not realize the difference since name is so important to them and that fact that they don't follow marketing trends.

Its hardware obviously but really has no reason to be in the XP Hardware forum, since that forum is for hardware running under XP. I only brought this up since people are upset that it was posted in both the 2k and XP forums, which I don't really care about. To avoid all of this flaming, it would've just been better to dump this post in the "Other" forum, as all 2k/XP users go there.

If you installed AudioHQ and other SB Live accessories remove them first. SB Live drivers are easily uninstalled by removing the hardware device in Device Manager, in fact removing the sb live accessories may remove the drivers for you too. Do this before shutting off the PC and yanking out the Live and putting the Audigy in.

Honestly this post should have been dumped into the other forum, since it is isn't a hardware configuration issue with either XP or 2k/NT, its general talk about GeForce4 MX.

Ahhh yes, I slapped an OLD 5.25" 1.2 MB floppy disk drive in my Windows XP system. Naturally the only way to format a floppy is to use the Command Prompt and type in format b: the Windows dialog can't even pick it up.

Has anybody applied this patch? I want to know if it brings back the "Restart in MS-DOS Mode" into WinME's shutdown screen. http://www.geocities.com/mfd4life_2000/