Brian Frank

That power supply is too weak to use with Athlons and more than 2 IDE drives and floppy and a few cards. Seriously, that power supply is probably your biggest problem. You'll need a bigger one for future use anyway.

Not a clue. Someone will figure it out, and it will get passed around. Just a matter of time.

Yup. People come up with the weirdest things. I'm not sure what is worse: the stuff that is real, or the stuff that people make up.

It's your power supply. Get at least a 300 watter, AMD approved. Get a new one and then come back if the problems persist.

Which card r u using? I'm sure people want to know;)

Nope. I'm actually glad, seeing as I'd lose 5 gigs in the process. I also don't like the way the Promise IDE RAID bios doesn't allow you to not RAID anything. The HPT370 on my VP6 does, which is very nice. This is only in on-board IDE RAID, BTW. The only IDE card I've seen used is a promise ATA100 non-RAID, and it works the same as the one on my A7V.

Hehe. I wish I had RAID right now. I'm just going by what I've read, and spouting it out. Oh, and I'm just guessing that you'll be doing RAID 0--striping. It will increase performance, but just realize that if one drive bites the dust you are not going to have a good day if you didn't backup your stuff.(duh) From what I've been told, mixing speeds doesn't cause any data problems, but it doesn't do the faster drive justice. Basically, it comes down to how much you wanna spend on drives.

I guess that's SHS page, so talk to him about it.

Hey, Marktait, try not to post the same thing in two different places next time--I know it throws me off. "That makes me angry, and when Dr. Evil gets angry, people DIE!!"

Yeah, you can do it, but it's not adviseable to run drives with different rpms, since you won't get nearly as good of performance as with 2 7200rpm drives. If I were u, I'd just buy a couple new drives instead of tracking down a mate for your 13 gig. I mean, 20 gig 5400rpm drives are less than $90 at best buy, and you can get 30 gigs for a little over $100. Probably find 'em cheaper online.

In my experience, any loss of speed is unnoticeable going to NTFS from FAT32, and the only way I knew that was running benchmarks and guesstimating.

Det4's work great for me. I'd been using the 10.80's for a long time, as any driver after that would slow down in non DX8 games, which is just about all of mine. No loss in performance forn non DX8 games, and DX8 got a major boost from the last dets (12.20 I think) I tried. So far Win2k runs dandy with the new dets. If something runs a foul, I'll just drop back to the 10.80's that I know work great.

Yes it does work, and has been for a looooong time. 5 PCs (all Win2k) with a switch and a gateway with our dsl modem. XP's NetBEUI didn't play nice, so networking was iffy at best. Use it at your own risk.

My Toshiba 6x DVD works fine. Optical (save, maybe, DVD burners) drives, hard drives, floppies--should all function just fine. I'd think the same thing for most drives, except the ones with really new technology not standard like DVD/CD/RW,floppy, and hard drives.

Specs in sig, subject to change at anytime (where the hell is my GeForce 2 Pro!)

XP, woop-dee-do. ;(

My reasons have been defined already for not going to XP. Restating the two above posts: XP doesn't offer me anything I'm going to really use or want. I know I can remove it, but there is a lotta crap I really hate with XP: movie maker, system restore, msn messenger, the fact that there's more annoying crap to disable and settings to change than before, and that it's geared at non uber-geeks. The features are nice for some, but I won't be using most of them to begin with, and others I wish were optional aren't unless you edit this and that. If you want a purty interface, you can get WindowBlinds or something else for cheap or free. I don't use instant messaging or really want it, and not being able to have a choice in the matter is irritating. Movie maker--don't use and don't want it. System restore--it's limited in it's usefulness since it's not something that can beat doing a backup in the first place. Personalized menus--I hate that crap, and I don't like having the control panel grouped. More stuff I have to change. People complain about IE being entwined with Windows, but I think that's the least annoying thing honestly. I haven't seen any reason to not use IE, and Netscape doesn't offer it. If I stop liking IE, I'll look at something else. While MS is trying to market XP to the business world, I don't see it as such and think that this is going to be a very annoying OS to work with.

If ya think ACPI is a problem, you're mistaken. Very rarely is it an actual problem, but gets blamed frequently. Speaking from experience, ACPI is best left alone or bad things happen---along the lines of completely reinstalling the OS.

Some people have gotten it to work, but it's not a guarantee. Basically, take the previous advice and buy a new video card, don't go to XP, or use 98 or 2k. I'd check around the forums and see if some people have had success, but it's still up in the air. As far as I know, anything other than using 3dfx cards for display purposes is worthless in XP. You won't be seeing any offical drivers from anyone. The open source movement might come up with something, but it's not a sure thing.

The IRQ sharing is usually not the problem. It gets branded as the culprit even though it rarely is. I have 8 devices on IRQ 9, including my sound, video, extra IDE controllers, my nic... This has been running very stable. Some of the problem is with the BIOS, usually in older systems, that has poor ACPI implementation and can cause problems.

Tried 3dfx yet? If your drivers aren't there, you're out of luck---especially for that Voodoo 1. I seriously don't think any drivers other than the default Win2k drivers are available.

I think if ATI can improve their drivers, they could smack down the GF3, and maybe compete with the GF3 Ti500. ATI's biggest weakness is drivers, which is a shame too.

It sure sounded good awhile ago, but now it's more up in the air. It's definitely a dream come true for PC builders, no question. It would be interesting if you could use the integrated video for a 2nd monitor instead of it automatically disabling itself ala the i815.

AlecStarr: Oh, yeah, I'm over at 2cpu all the time, under a different alias tho.

No. MS has different versions of each OS, though just a few lines of code may be changed.