Draxar

It depends heavily on what you do with your computer... Since you got 192 Mb of ram, Win2k should not make too much swap. For regular work, internet applications win2k surpasses win98 without doubt... more stable... code is also much better implemented... IE does not crash as much... However if you are a gamer... You should keep a copy of Win98 handy. Lot of games work of win2k but a lot crashes... And drivers are still immatures... So performance is ought to take a hit... Hope it does help a bit...

Oh well it might just seem unuseful, but that kind of noise (assuming you're describing it correctly) is related to a disk read error. Therefore I suggest you do a surface test with norton ... try using patterns (does that still exist?). A harddrive failure also generaly hog the system horribly as does a cdrom reader with a damaged cd. Just a suggestion... -Draxar

Oh well it might just seem unuseful, but that kind of noise (assuming you're describing it correctly) is related to a disk read error. Therefore I suggest you do a surface test with norton ... try using patterns (does that still exist?). A harddrive failure also generaly hog the system horribly as does a cdrom reader with a damaged cd. Just a suggestion... -Draxar

Okay I got a cheap motherboard (I really needed one cheap and fast) It's got the IDE chipset ALi 1541/1543 (1541 is more likely since LiNUX reports this) At the Windows 2K startup, there's an infamous timout (about 30-45 seconds) caused by the IDE when I'm activating DMA mode. The Event Manager also reports "IdePort0 has not responded within timout" The error disappear when I'm going to PIO mode but that slows down the computer quite a lot in games... I used the new ALi ide drivers, full of hopes... Yes the error at Windows 2K statup is gone, it now loads instantly... but now when it says "Starting networking..." jhust after switching to graphic mode and before the password query, it stops for about 30-45 seconds... And alas, the event manager still reports IDE failures... The ALi dribvers only moved the infamous timout... And if I'm setting my cdrom on dma... well it works but I'm receving random "IdePort1 failure" in the event manager... just a plain flood of ide failure... that's not good. Could someone help me? System: Redfox AGP-ALi AMD K6/2 3DNow! 80 Mb RAM PC100 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee Sound Blaster Live! Value Acer 50x cdrom Iomega Ditto-250 (not supported on w2k)