Brian Frank

I don't think so. AMD's documents give me trouble, as well as the GeForce FAQ, despite that it's updated regularly. I'm under the assumption that they would use a recent version to write their PDF's. Some sites will do it, other's don't give me a single problem.

Are you using Gigabyte's drivers, or nVidia's?

Yeah, but AMD and Tyan do not support them. AthlonMP's are the only ones supported. That hasn't stopped a lot of people from running ones other than the MP's, and they seem to run just fine. Several sites have run dual T-Birds. The new Durons (Morgan) can run in SMP, again no support.

Don't forget that the KT133 has that little problem where it can't run the CPU's frontside bus at 133MHz. You can cut and/or connect different bridges and make it work, but if I'm that desperate, I'll buy a new board. The RAM can run like that just fine, but not the FSB. KT133A and up should run it just fine. I'm in the dark about the XP, however, a better comparison would be to the Athlon MP. I'm not sure if it runs or is supported in SMP. My guess is that it will work in SMP, but not necessarily supported. AMD has has SMP capable chips since the K-5, but no chipsets appeared to support it. I guess the only other thing I can think of is that it won't take your motherboard along if the heatsink comes off.

You hit 'Set' didn't you? Also, if you set a dinky page file, I could see that being a problem if you don't have enough RAM. I use a static size for my pagefile, and use whatever Win2k is suggesting, like 500-something megs or so.

I have a theory that XP really is evil. Never watched it, but Kubrick's 2001 movie has the evil computer HAL. XP, like 2k, and NT, has the Hardware Abstraction Layer, or HAL. XP is released in the year 2001 with HAL. Hmmm...

I'd imagine for the hell of it.

I know, but the evil HAL is in 2001, same year XP is released. ;(

I usually don't get a hold of products until they're at or near the low-end of the scale. I mean, 800MHz is the *slow* speed, or pretty close. Here's what I can remember about the first computer I personally owned. Cyrix MII 300 (P233) Venus mobo with SiS chipset, on-board video and sound. AT formfactor. refurbished Quantum Fireball 3.2GB hard drive ATA33 5400 RPM. Memorex 40x CD-ROM (everyone of those I've seen has crapped out), 1.44 floppy. AT case formerly housing our original 486 family system. Got an ATI Rage XL PCI card later on, and traded the Quantum for a 5.24GB Fujitsu. Fireball died in my grandparents PC. Sold the cyrix, mobo and case to one of my friends when I got a PII 400 and SE440BX-2 mobo for my birthday. The only original part I have that I still use is the floppy drive. Have my original mouse too, but I like my Optical ones better. The only thing any machine in the house has on either of my rigs is in the hard drives: more space and/or faster RPM. However, I haven't been able to tell a real difference from their 7200RPM drives. UT takes a little while to load, but my rigs spank anyone else's rigs overall, if not in all cases.

It can also be that some people don't like certain features, and aren't necessarily anti-MS. I can give you plenty of reasons why I don't like about Windows, but I'll just name a few. --Movie Maker, it's an optional component that MS gives no choice. --DVD Player, requires an MPEG decoder card--which a majority of users don't have, or a software decoder--makes DVD Player pretty stupid considering that's what you're using it for. Video cards today are quite capable of running a DVD full-screen without hiccups. --Autoplay, Autorun. No actual way to disable without installing TweakUI or other tweakers, or making the changes in the registry. --Personalized menus. Annoying in Windows, but it's easier to disable. In Office 2000, it's more of a pain to disable. --Office assistants. Microsoft Bob reincarnated. I don't know about you, but MS, as well as other companies and their products (Adobe Acrobat, anyone) seem to become more of a pain in the neck with each subsequent releas, at least as far as the vets go. Again, personal preferences don't necessarily mean you're against the company and/or all it's products.

I like to show my rigs.

Apparently Asus temp reports are off, and higher than what they really are. If my temps were as high as they appeared, I'd be locking up pretty frequently. 50 C is just a tad hot to be running my Duron for too long and not lock up. My system doesn't lock up in games, or running various torture tests, so I don't think I'm having a problem with heat.

Dingo, SHS is an admin, and he did that stuff about 3dfx cards here. Gee, ya think he'd know anything about that? XP is different enough from 2k that the same driver may not work unless it's specified to work with XP too. It might work, and then again it might not.

From what I've read, the person that tried headphones with it said it was pretty good. However, this warrants the question of if you're gonna buy the Audigy, aren't ya gonna get some nice speakers to go with it (Klipsch 5.1, anybody)?

Of no use to XP-only users, but the 21.80's are the first Det's I've really liked in Win2k since the 10.80's. No loss in "older" games as well as great DX8 performance. 3DMark2001 ran exceptionally well, better than the 12.41's, the last dets I tried b4 I stopped trying each new version I got my hands on.

Go to 3dfx in the download's section. You'll need to get the 3dfx tools for Win2k there. They add gamma controls and any extra's the card uses--though the functions might not work that great if yur not used to them.

Me. Oh, I'm waiting for a 512-way Itanium rig. Seriously, I'm waiting for my damn GF2 Pro card to come in. I'm looking at getting some larger drives for my VP6 in RAID 1, or 0 (have ta think about that one), upgrading my power supply on both to 400 Watters, especially my A7V--I have at least 10 fans in this rig, along with 4 drives, and overclocked CPU, and just about every slot filled---all running on a 300 Watter PSU. It doesn't happen often enough, but I can guarantee that the lock up I get about once every month or two is the cause. I've got a few other things that demand my cash right now, but that's one thing I recently realized I ought to get. That or remove a few fans, cause it's kinda loud--not as bad as a Delta tho 8)

I'm not sure if this helps any, but my dad's Presario laptop has the ESS Allegro sound in it. Did he by chance get a look in Device Manager to see what was being used?

Make sure your RAM is good for overclocking, and that it's PC800. Play around with different BIOS settings too. While the CPU is operating at 100MHz x 17, remember that the system bus is running at "400MHz" so it would essentially go up 4MHz for ever 1MHz increase to the CPU. While I'm not familar with the P4T, I have heard there's some BIOS feature that helps your OC. I ended up using the dipswitches to OC on my A7V, and then toggled some of the remaining options in BIOS.

Another convert! ME is total trash: promised much, but failed to follow through. IMO, ME is worse than 98---hell, I'd say it might be worse than 95.

As long as the drivers for your hardware are written well, you shouldn't have that much of a slow down. It's been long enough that Win2k drivers should perform just as well as in 98. MS hyped up XP too much. Almost all the *improvements* in XP are stuff I won't be using and much of it isn't optional. XP does not offer enough for me to shell out the $200-300 for both of my machines. XP is good to a certain extent though. However, XP seems like MS is making many optional components mandatory--unless you go back and make them optional. One size does not fit all, and that is a bother to me. While I don't encourage piracy, or disagree with means to enforce it, the Product Activation is forcing XP users to keep MS informed about their configuration if so much hardware is changed. Of course this is by far just one of the irritating things that MS has done in an OS. You can get cheaper eye candy for Win2k and just get WindowBlinds or other OS skinner for much less than XP.

I'd leave them there. In the event that the files in the WINNT directory got corrupted, Win2k would look to the service pack files to get an uncorrupted version. It's probably in your best intrests to just leave them there.

Yes, but it's not recommended. It's there so you don't have to insert the CD when Win2k needs a file, like in 98. If ya need more space, buy another hard drive.

I heard some story about a Mac user saying that XP makes the user pay royalties to MS when you install hardware. MS couldn't get away with that in the first place, and Product Activation already has enough people pissed off. I've burnt a bunch of drivers and updates for a friend in Win2k under NTFS, and he can read them fine under 98.

Happy B-day, Eddie!