Brian Frank

Get an Asus A7V or A7V133. Sweet boards, man. They are a little frustrating to get running, but in the end, its very well worth it. The only really bad thing about the board is the worthless CNR slot on it. Geez, there couldve been another PCI slot or an ISA slot instead. If you just OC by the FSB, you wont be able to get it completely stable past 113MHz. But go for the best one in your area.

I talk smack (trash). but thats it. Dont you wish it was 4:20 all the time?

Ive heard about bios updates for GF2-based cards, but the problem is the only program to do the up[censored] runs under Win9x. Nothing about Win2k/NT/XP. Unless there is a serious malfuntion with the card, I'll just stick with the latest Dets. and OCing for performance. I also understand that once you flash the GF2, you cant you any other drivers for the card except Nvidia's reference drivers.

Well, that explains why MS makes all the money--have an OS with one problem that wont be fixed until the next release. Oh goody, a mulitple OS virus. I want my Linux AV right now.

The one thing you might want to realize is that I bought the promo upgrade the DAY it was released. Therefore, there wouldve been no patches yet to fix the problems anyway. Thats a good car analogy, JJ32. I try to keep up with patches and such, especially my antivirus updates. Norton AV 2k would install and scan, but it wouldnt scan when schedualed, and I had to manually scan it myself. ME shouldve been less trouble than 98, but it really turned into my not liking it.

Of all the OS's out there its not what Id call widespread. The only place where Ive seen the box of Novell is at work, but there primarily using Macs. Didnt mean to pass judgement, not saying its a bad OS, but its pretty much little used to my knowledge, but I see that I was wrong about that one. It sure must have its uses, or no one would have ever used it. Especially if companies in the Forbes top 500 use it. I guess it would depend on what you need. Microsoft must be doing something right if they have a good hold on the OS market. Id never want to see just a Windows based environment, or just a Mac one, or a Linux one. There needs to be competition among the OS platforms, or their would be total world tion by one. Thanx for the info, clutch.

I use OGL in HL too, but Ive got a GF2MX. The reason I do is because in D3D when I exit a game, I cant see anything (good thing I know the keyboard shortcuts). I tried out a Radeon 32 DDR, but the performance wasnt all that impressive. Voodoo4~3000 in 3dmark2k, Radeon~4000, and the GF2MX with the Det. 11.01~5150+. Some of that comes from overclocking, but the Radeon has some serious driver problems, specifically speed. No doubt the card is sweet, but DVD playback cant save it if the drivers dont do it justice. I really wish there was a price war with video cards like the cpu price war between Intel and AMD.

I really hope MS doesnt expect us to buy a copy of an OS for each computer we own. Lots of people have this as the biggest gripe about XP. This is the RC beta. I dont have anything against product activation, but its a problem when you have purchased software and then cant use it on another computer that you use for personal use also because of the product activation key. I really hope MS considers this, because it could be XP's achilles heel.

Pimpin, have you been smoking pot recently?

8) Go out now and get a 300 watt PSU immediately! You've got so much stuff, the psu cant handle the drain well enough. I dont know about scsi, but they seem to have a need for juice.

What makes you say its the card? If the processor is getting too hot, that can cause lockups. What motherboard are you using? Try this: in bios, manually configure the AGP drive strength. Set it like EA or higher and then see if its a problem. Try different drivers. What youve put up gives me no reason to see why the card would be bad. Just because you cant play games in certain modes doesnt mean the video card is necessarily bad. Some of Windows system could of hiccupped, and if you would just reinstall the drivers, that might be the only thing left to do.

Well, where are you getting it from. If its from Micron, duh. Micron memory should have MT on the chips. Or you could just ask the guy you're getting it from. Having a better video card is always a good thing. A GeForce2 MX is a stellar card for the price. The next speed upgrade will probably cost you another $100 to go from a MX to a GTS.

And people say IM crazy... hehehe *insane laughter begins*

If you can find one, get a Guillemot Maxi Sound Fortissimo. Its probably not quite on par with an SB card, but it works right out of the box with no drivers. Thats probably the best alternative. Now, hearing all these problems with SB Live cards make me really glad I didnt go for one of those cards. I dont know about the Maxi Sound Muse though, but its like $30, so you could also consider that one, but I dont know how good it is.

Im not up and with it on the command line...never liked to go into dos. That probably explains why I prefer the KDE interface more than, say, Sawmill. Yeah, I know about Open Source. Im just not knowledgable enough on Linux to be able to compile my own kernel. Thats something Im gonna have to do some more research on. Kinda scary to me. I really know diddly squat about Linux in the grand scheme of things.

Multi-boot, baby! Definitely multi-boot.

Okay... What is she doing ? ? ? ? ? *puzzled look*

I have the driving values set all the way up to FF and it helps a lot, especially since Im OCing the FSB. The 11.01 Dets are out, so give those a shot. They're a little different than the 10.80s, but not by much. They seem to resolve a little speed issue with UT. Also, set the system speed to Optimal. Oh,yeah, try getting DX8 too. It works fine on mine, but some people have had problems with it. There is a program to uninstall DX8, Ive seen it around, just in case you want to uninstall it.

Ive had no problems with 9x and Linux. Ive done a triple-boot with Win2k/ME and Linux Mandrake 7.x with no problems. Make sure the Grub bootloader or LILO bootloard is installed and just edit that if you wanted ME to boot first. Unless there's something in Red Hat specifically thats the problem, it should work. Linux is great in a dual boot situation, because I dont have to devote quite as much space to it as Windows, so I dont have to have duplicate files of the same thing on the Linux partition.

Hmm...Windows 2000 is more popular, has better support, easy networking, stability. I havent ever used Novell, but Ive seen more of BeOS than that, not that I care for BeOS, but Ive seen more books out for BeOS or Linux than for Novell. Even if Novell is a superior OS, there diddly squat for it. Any OS has flaws, but MS is at the top by a big shot. Ive heard Windows in general runs on 90% of all computers combined. I like Linux, and Im very sure its here to stay, but Windows is a safe haven and I am very impressed with it. Id really like to see Novell being supported enough to have Dell preinstall it on servers, just like Linux. Id say the d e a d OS award goes to Novell. [This message has been edited by Brian Frank (edited 28 March 2001).]

I like cats.... .... ... .. . They taste yummy.

Am I an idiot? Apparently JJ32, a new member seems to think so. I know Im not an IT level person, I still have enough knowledge to not be an idiot. While I do have my opinions and am not right on every issue, I dont see why this newcomer seems to think I am a complete moron. If you want to know what Im talking about see the Windows9x/ME section and the "Am I the only one who thinks ME sucks?" post.

Well, the flaming post seems to have finally died. Now lets go over to the "I dont mean to everyone off...." post and put up some useless blabber.

Dont diss Eddie.

I dont think we'll see any "trouble-free" computing. There will always be one thing in just one instance that an OS will have problems. Good thing we dont program people with an OS. CPUs do caluclate, so they could be consider a very,very,very expensive calculator, but thats just scratching the surface of the cpu. XP is an exciting development minus one issue that has a lot of people steamed--the activation code. Other than that, the betas seem very good. Im not trying to start a war here, but when I eventually shut up, it would be well of all of us to have fair warning that any OS will have problems. Show me a perfect OS, and I'll guarantee its not. No matter how hard MS or any company may try, there will be flaws. Most of the time there will be a little issue here or there, but for the most part there's nothing critical. ME does run better on a clean install. For me, I thought it would be better than it turned out to be. Maybe I hyped it up too much and thus a big letdown. Although I turned this feature off, the System Restore is a good idea, but despite the fact that it does have a controllable amount for the size, it would be nice to see MS find a way to backup settings without using a good size of space. Yeah, I know you can get an 81 GB hard drive, but Im a miser on hard drive space--okay a control freak. I think hyping up a product and then having problems, not necessarily huge problems, but ones enough to turn off people, even small issues, hurts the product. XP's biggest flaw it seem is the activation code. ME's biggest problem was the backwards compatability wasnt so backwards compatible after all. Win2ks biggest problem is the support of all vendors when compared to Win9x. I go with whats less problematic for ME. ME is the most stable, so Ive heard with the full version. Well I bought the promo, and didnt like it. I also didnt like Win2k, and I though MS going to the NT code for all OS's was a big mistake. Not now, I really thing its for the best, although I do think that MS should slow down its OS cycle. Linux doesnt move this fast. Its really of what OS gives YOU the least trouble. Whatever floats your boat.