pivko

yes, i modified the registry keys and it seems to be fine. well, i have not test the system by letting in run for more than one day, but i will do that during this weekend. and also: i did not disable the cache, i did not want to get rid of that while it is there. so it seems it might work without it, maybe it depends, so the best way is to try it for the very one system. and as far as the K6-2 write, this is one of the settings modified by registry entry and i think they switch it ON, and thats great because it is really noticeable, when you turn it off.

I`m sorry, but there are not such registry settings in my W2K registers. I have Creative Labs latest drivers installed (they are based on nvidia refs anyway, but i think they should be the best for creative RIVA TNT i`m using). i also installed the AGP 1.68 driver from Ali. And when I look to H_KEY_LOCAL/SOFTWARE/ALI/Ali AGP Driver, there are no such setting. are you sure those are for W2K and not for W9x? i also tried to read the original article in german, though my german is far from perfect, i did not find any reference there, that this article refers to w2k, it seemed to me, that that was really awkward tweak to make new 5.22 detonator drivers work better on Ali chipsets and the writer admits, that older 3.xx drivers were more stable. so the conlusion might be, that the think that mattered was the K6 write allocate or external cache disable, if those were the only other things you have changed.

well, depends on the way you take it. i think that when buying NVIDIA based card, you`re trading off top performance for stability a little bit. these cards are superb, if they ran, and there is actually very few systems that run them really crispy with no flaws. there are huge threads about they incompatibility with K7 as well. and not to leave intel alone, abit BE-II 6 has been known for some probs too. the resume is this: if you want you system for gaming, buy NVIDIA card and you have to understand that with the state of drivers now, you will have to reboot from time to time. (those reported cases of crash every 20-30 minutes are extreme and probably are caused by either defective hardware or some settings mistake - my RIVA TNT/ASUS P5A goes BSOD one time per day in average- if the comp is under normal load the whole day). and if you want stable system, running all the time, with no crash, as a server or whatever, it`s stupid to stuff in TNT or GeForce, go for decent 16 MB ATI, and you are more than fine.

i got an ASUS P5A and AMD K6-2 CPU which is supposed to get pretty hot sometimes, especially after long gameplay. the systems when on heavy load gives me around 70 degrees celsius. i have fan plus heatsink. so i think the ASUS temp measurement system is a little wrong, because if the processor really got up to that temperature, it would probably freeze the system which it does not.

well first it is necessary to point out that there is NO WAY how to change from ASPI enabled to disabled or vice versa without reinstalling the system, well actually there is, but it is VERY unstable, so it`s better to reinstall it. second, on some systems ACPI works very well, on some does not, the worst thing is, that even when you use the same mobo as your friend, you might still get different results. mine comp does work much better without ACPI enabled. but the best way is to try it and see. generally speaking, there are some problems especially with NVIDIA based video cards, the drivers are far from being perfect, but still it might work very well for you. mine doesn not though :-(

i have similar problems with creative rivaTNT and ASUS P5A MB. i highly suspect, that ASUS is not the problem, i'm much more convinced, that it's the drivers, which are far from being perfect so far. my comp does not fortunately crash every half an hour, but pretty much every second day, when i work on it heavily. my conlusion is that: as always, M$ products have to be allowed some time to mature. this was the same thing with win95, when they started, for the first year you hardly ever found a computer, which ran them perfectly. and because socket7 systems with precised drivers run now perfect in win9x, i hope, after some time, they will in win2k as well. i know, it's ridiculous, that M$ crap is not working well, when it's released, but that's the way it is. maybe thomas penfield jackson will help :-)

well. but i do not have such entries in event viewer. when i get a blue screen and restart it doesn't usually show which driver caused it. but this is not what bug me most. i know, that this system has yet driver problems, and it will take some time, before the drivers are quite stable. what concerns me more are those desktop lockups. there are no errors reported in event manager about that, it's completely undocumented. nothing crashes either - all the applications are normally running, i just cannot click the mouse to change active window etc.

i would like to share my experience with win2k. i'm running AMD K6-II@350 MHz with 64 MB RAM, RIVA TNT, sound Creative PCI 128, MB ASUS P5A (latest BIOS), and PLANET ENW8300 network adapter. w2k is installed in ACPI mode. even though all this HW is listed as w2k fully compatible, from time to time system randomly dumps the memory and restarts or (and that's the strangest) the screen locks up. but it's not the total lock-up as we know it from W9x, the screen is just not active, pressing win key or ALT-TAB usually helps as well as running the task manager. i would be really curious if someone of you encountered the same situation? pivko