Brian Frank

Wow! and I though I had no life...

Hey!, I dont cut and paste...I uhh, just dont pay much attention to the actual thing. Just make sure about the filesystem thing, could cause problems. Oh, and that P should be a lowercase p.

Yeah, some things make Win2k a pain, but it depends on how big of one it is. I have some dos-based games, but since I wasnt concered as much with those and everything else would work, I switched. As long as the game will run under the other pc half way decently, I wouldnt sweat it. Also Ive heard there's a new version of the compatability app on Microsofts website, and that it's supposed to fix some issues with the one on the Win2k cd.

Okay, I tried out a Radeon card, and took it out. Uninstalled drivers of my V4 and everything along with it. I didnt like the Radeon, anyway now the V4 is back in. But all my games are off a little to the right. I can correct this in by calling up the monitor's OSD, but then my desktop is off. Also, ever since I put in the Radeon, the menu in HL doesnt come up after Ive exited out of the game Im playing. I also got the latest Via 4-in-1 drivers. This is the first time Ive installed. Would I be able to just reinstall my games and have that fix it?

Actually, I found that I just had to set it to my desktop res (1152x864) on D3D and Open GL and things fixed itself. HL and games like it I set on OGL,otherwise I cant see the screen after I exit from a game in D3D.

8) Stay away from ME; go with 98se hands down. ME is more trouble than its worth, especially if you have any dos games you'd like to run.

My systems as they stand now: ------------------ Whaazzzupppppppppp! Asus A7V Duron 800@912MHz 448MB SDRAM PC133 Samsung 48x CD-ROM Toshiba 12x DVD-ROM Zip CD650 USB 4/4/6 Zip 100 USB Maxtor 20.4 GB ATA100 5400RPM Hercules Prophet II MX (core:196MHz ram:197MHz) Guillemot Maxi Sound Fortissimo SIIG 3 port 1394 PCI Adapter D-Link DFE-530 10/100 NIC Creative Cambridge Soundworks FPS1000 MS Intellimouse Optical Kleer 17-inch @ 85Hz 1152x864x32 desktop Kiwi Orb Fan HDD cooler pulling air in Dual slot fan to suck air out Case fan to suck air out Dual 80mm fans to blow on cards. Win2k Pro Pentium III 667 Tyan Trinity 400 256MB SDRAM PC100 Toshiba 6x DVD-ROM Western Digital 17.2GB ATA66 5400RPM hdd WD 2.5GB ATA33 4500RPM hdd Voodoo3 3000AGP w/TV-Out SB 16 OEM PCI SB compatibleISA sound card Realtek 10/100 NIC HP 1280 17" monitor MS Intellimouse optical PC Concepts wave keyboard 3-way speakers Win2k Pro/WinME "To be or not to be, that is the question."

Durons: cheap, fast, and overclockable. Celerons: slower, not so fast, and overclockable. Durons rule. ~90% of the Athlon performance and at insanely low prices to boot. Kinda like the GF2 MX. I love overclocking. I'll stick with the PIII's in my PIII system and Durons in my Duron system. T-Birds are just a little too toasty for my comfort. Not saying i wouldnt go to the 1.2 GHz T-Bird, but Im not ready for that one yet.

Stay away from ALi chipsets. The Magik chipset is worthless even with DDR capabilities. Go with AMD chipsets if you're not going with Via. Via is the most common, but AMD's chipsets will probably be whipped by Via. You do realize that the 760 requires DDR and thats another added cost. SiS would also not be up your alley. AMD just puts out chipsets to push technology they'd like to see Via, and other chipset makers utilize. Plus, AMD is not as big as Intel. If you're going to stay away from Via, get a PIII and an 815EP based motherboard, otherwise stick with what you got. SiS and ALi are targeted more for bare minimums in computing, like low end integrated systems. If you do switch to an Intel chip, I recommend looking at a Tyan board-the Tomcat i815e. I have a Via based Tyan board, and it is very stable. Tyan started off as a server board manufacturer, and seem to have very solid boards. I dont see a lot of 760 boards out right now. I wouldnt buy one just because, AMD has a much less stellar performance chipsets than what would come from Via. If your gonna switch boards, your either going to have to buy new memory, or a new processor. Whatever way you go, stay clear of the Pentium 4 and RDRAM, prices are the only thing that increases dramatically in that area.

If your gonna upgrade the motherboard, its a very good idea to reformat and reinstall. Its best to do this, because Windows will get confused, and then complain, which will cause you to complain. You should be able to just get a new motherboard and processor and put it in. Depending on how cramped it is you may have to remove a lot of the drives to remove it, and maybe even the power supply. As long as its an ATX case, you shouldnt have problems. If you plan on getting an Athlon, having a 300 watt power supply will help, or if you have a lot of stuff now. Anything below 250 watts is not advisable. It would almost be more prudent to just buy an new case to go along with the board and processor, then, since you'd be taking out most of the components anyway, you could just transfer the parts over.

I have a test system that I'd like to know how well it would run with XP. Im already dual booting with ME and Win2k. Specs: Pentium III 667@667 192MB SDRAM Tyan Trinity 400 Western Digital ATA66 5400RPM 17.2 GB WD ATA33 4500RPM 2.5 GB (Mp3's) Voodoo 3 3000 AGP Realtek 10/100 NIC PCI SB16 OEM PCI SB compatible ISA card, but thats just cuz the PCI sound card cant function under the version of Linux I got. I have like a ~5 or so GB partition set aside for another OS. I'll probably get some more RAM for it later on, but right now everything seems to run pretty smoothly.

Hmm, the only distro Ive worked with is Mandrake. I do have a Caldera beta, but Id much rather run a final version. I'll see whats up with different distros though. RH seems to be pretty standard as far as Linux goes. Mandrake 7.2 seems a step in the right direction for Linux. But, I still think major improvements can be made. Im not saying Linux should just become another Windows, but if more manufacturers would include Linux drivers on the CD, that would help immensely. On a side note, I read in one Linux mag that with XP, some hardware specifications by MS would prevent the same hardware from running on Linux. Im just remembering it off the top of my head, so this is the best I can do. If this is true, Linux is in some deep sh*t. Anyway, I'll see what pops up with Linux distros in the future. KDE2.1 is a really exciting developement for Linux.

All I know is both my rigs run boards using a Via chipset (KT133 and Apollo Pro 133A) and no problems. AMD needs to get on the ball with chipsets, because if Via really comes out with a chipset that hurts AMD's chips, Intel could stomp on AMD quite easily. SiS and ALi are what I would consider to produce bad chipsets for my purposes. Ive see the ALi Magik chipset--absolutly worthless. Ive only really gotten into the computer world it the past 2 years, so I dont know a whole lot about what greivences people have against what company. The first board I had was an SiS chipset and ran a Cyrix MII 300 which really ran at 233MHz. Thats the only computer I didnt put together myself. Saw it assembled and just figured I could do that myself. Just follow directions. *I still screw up with the floppy cable though.* Every freakin' time! Really, really off topic here.

We can all benefit from a price war between video card companies. Just look at the one going on between Intel and AMD, and look how cheap speed is. Look at how cheap the Durons are: ~$100 gets you an 800MHz easily, and then you can, theoretically, overclock it to 1GHz no sweat. Mmmm...think of cheap cards with the power of the GF2 Ultra or better.

Whoa! Unless youve got a problem with Win2k, you can leave it as is. After youve installed 98, just boot off the Win2k cd and run the repair option instead of the install option. Once you're in Win2k you can set the default OS and how long till it boots to the default. Right click on my computer, go to Properties/Hardware/Advanced/Starup and Recovery. There you can set that. You may have a problem if you want the 98 partition to see whats on the Win2k partition if they're different filesystems. If you want 98 to see Win2k, then Win2k must be formatted as FAT32. If its that way, then go ahead and reformat. Thats the only way Ive ever heard of to convert from NTFS to FAT32. NOW, I read your post. Oops. Oh well...

Hey, Clutch, this system I updated was an Asus A7V. The mobo CD with it includes both a dos program (AFlash.exe) and a Windows app to update the bios. I figured, that would probably be the safest route, as far as user error was concered. Anyway, the new bios really smoothed some things out, and may have fixed some annoying BSOD's. They were nothing other than irritating at worst. Never heard of bios update horror stories. This is the first mobo Ive seen that has this software included. I didnt think it was too risky. Oh,well.

Whats WAR3Z?

Good point Inferno2000, that would clear up alot. My PIII system under Win2k 3dMark2000:2153 My Duron@912 " ":4627 highest score on default res. Its fun to post your specs and scores, even if you know there's much better systems out there.

I just want to sync them across the network.

Isnt Mandrake basically RedHat with some different features,cause thats basically what Ive heard. Right now since this isnt my main rig, the video card isnt a big deal. The V3 runs great with any OS Ive run, cause 3dfx was pretty much the only graphics chip maker for gaming back a few years ago. So, it thinks its a 2000, so what? It runs well enough. I am very excited how Linux is moving along especially with the 2.4 kernal improved USB support. I'm used to using the KDE interface, probably cuz its the most familiar. I really would like to network the box when its running Linux, but in Mandrake, I was only able to get the DSL to run.

Any ISP that tries to double-bill you is screwy. Plus, that instant messaging is proprietary from what I understand. Theres a competing solution to that which everyone else is supporting. Plus, Ive heard of a lot of problems with aol. I dont see the need for aol. The regular service doesnt have the DSL support, for that there's aol plus, but ive heard nothing on cable. Plus, Microsoft isnt behind them, in fact the only people behind them is themselves and really stupid users, no offense to anybody reading this with aol, but there just a crappy ISP. A better ISP is earthlink. Right now we're with a local ISP for DSL purposes. BTW, Juno is having some program that will do calculations on your pc when its not doing other things. I sure dont like things going on if I dont want them to and they're not necessary. Its an invasion of privacy.

Uhh...I havent had problems. What happened to you?

Try VMware or doing a dual boot with 98. Be warned though: VMware will take some resources away, so you might want to think about some extra RAM if you go that route, and especially if you only have 128MB of ram.

The KT7A Raid uses the KT133A chipset an update of the KT133 chipset used on the KT7 Raid. It basically allows you to overclock AMD cpus with the Front Side Bus (FSB)over the KT133's stable FSB of ~113MHz. Just know if you attempt FSB overclocking @115MHz the PCI clock runs at 39MHz and thats about the limit for PCI devices, and you really should have PC133 ram if you're going to do it this way. Also, word of warning if you do overclock: that Abit board and many KT133/KT133A motherboards cannot use some large HSF's, and the only one that can is the Asus A7V/A7V133 motherboards. I dont know if you will overclock, but I figured this might be helpful in any case. Keep your ram unless you're going to overclock by the FSB. The Athlon-C's, which use a 133MHz sdr/266MHz DDR FSB may have to use PC133 to run, but I havent heard anything about it. I hope this clears up some stuff, and doesnt confuse you. [This message has been edited by Brian Frank (edited 21 March 2001).]

One problem: the GF 2 Ultra is out; the Kyro isnt supposed to be out until April. However, cosidering the GF3 is IMO a really expensive GF2 Ultra anyway, the Kyro based cards could do very well. Hopefully the drivers for it wont suck like ATI's Radeon drivers. Im not really up on all the tech specs of the Kyro, but it does seem quite interesting technology with that tile-based rendering. But if the drivers arent good, the product will suffer, like ATI's Radeon lineup.