Brian Frank

ZA is pretty good, though a few things may slip by it. Black Ice Defender is supposed to be the best you can get. I'm using Norton's Internet security which features a firewall the the Norton Antivirus in one package. It's been suggested that you set up a proxy, and is the next best thing to being completely unplugged from the net. I haven't used a proxy, but it is another thing to consider. I haven't done any reseach other than what people have posted or told me, so you'll have to do some research for proxies.

Search the forums. It's been covered before.

Yup. Gotta reformat to go back. Even if you could *upgrade* XP to 2k or 98, it is always best to do a clean install then, instead of having to do it later at possibly a more inconvient time. I've personally never had good luck doing OS upgrades.

Okay, how far along in the install are you? What filesystem are you using? BTW, don't post the same question in two different sections.

Format in FAT32, then in XP convert it to NTFS.

XP is nice, but not enough that I really want to jump from 2k.

Uhh, you need to format the drive for a clean install. You should be able to do this in the WinXP setup. Just boot off the XP disc...

An earlier post suggested/mentioned changing ACPI. Leave it alone! Messing with ACPI in Win2k is bad, and I would expect the same from XP. Don't say you weren't warned...

Of course, if they did, 3dfx users would probably still complain that Nvidia is trying to screw them. Nvidia didn't make the chips or cards, and may not write good drivers because they've never done anything in designing the cards. I'd love it if my Voodoo 3 saw XP drivers, however, I'm certainly not counting on it. Nvidia is the only company now that I'm positive knows how to write drivers that don't suck. I'll stop here, before I rant about ATI.

When you say you let XP install the card's drivers, did you just reboot and make sure it completed the install? If you didn't, do that first, then shut down and plug your drives into the card. You may have done this, but I wasn't sure. Good luck.

Norton Firewall works very well. If you want a freebie, Zone Alarm is easy to get. If you are really serious about protecting your arse, XP's firewall won't do it. Norton Firewall doesn't take over your PC, neither does ZA. Apparently the best in Black Ice Defender, but there have been some complaints about in XP. I assume that we'll see a version out supporting XP fairly soon... Regardless, really do yourself a favor and get a firewall. Win2k does not come with a firewall. XP is the first version of Windows to feature this.

Well, all I can say is, under Win2k on my GF2 MX I've gotten some bumps up in the DirectX 8 arena. 3DMark2001 jumped close to 200 points after the drivers were installed. The ones that I've been using up til now have been the 10.80's, some of the fastest ones out there. Everything else after the 10.80, up through the 12.10--when I stopped trying out new dets, would drop my performance a tad in non DX8 scenarios. I haven't suffered a drop in performance at all with the 21.80's, plus DX8 gets a boost that doesn't affect the system.

However, for those that do, they will find that more RAM will be a necessity for practical use. RAM is about the cheapest upgrade you can do to improve speed, and may be the best. At least with Win2k, getting more RAM did much more than a faster CPU. All the games I had trouble with worked fine under 98 and 2000. It's been so long since I switched from ME to 2k, I've forgotten what it feels like to be booted back to the desktop for no reason whatsoever. Even people that aren't technically savvy with PCs really don't like ME at all. I've had hardware that didn't function correctly sometimes in ME, yet as performed flawlessly in Win2k. Drivers that did come didn't solve problems either. With Win2k, I don't have to do any tweaking to get it to run stable. I can't say the same about ME.

The other problem is that quite a few PC sold only come with 128MB of RAM, which is decent, but nowhere nearly enough for 2k or XP. Even worse, there are a few cheap rigs sold with a measly 64MB. Win2k was slow as hell with that, and adding a stick of 128 improved the speed dramatically. Sure, you can run it on 64MB, but you certainly won't be speeding along. Systems preinstalled with XP shouldn't come with anything less than 256MB. Some of the stuff is great to have in XP, but I did see a note from Symantec in a magazine regarding the XP firewall. It is not a complete solution, and only blocks some of the traffic. This is something that should definitely be noted, as people may very well assume that they are protected. This is something that should've been a complete solution, not a lite version like other apps in the OS.

Here's a link to try: http://www.ntcompatible.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=16411 I don't know if that helps any...

Now that I think about it, Socket 7 boards weren't AGP friendly, even though 3dfx cards didn't have that great of AGP implementation to begin with. Doesn't really help much... Yup. Yak right about cooling being a problem, although with that system I wouldn't suggest spending your money for a new tower on your current system. Look at a PC shop for fans. Best Buy doubled their prices, at least locally, on their fans and other cooling stuff. Get ball bearing fans tho; they last longer. Most cooling shouldn't cost more than $10 a fan, but it varies by location. Until recently when I stopped using my V3, I did have a slot cooler right below it, and could overclock it without having any lockups.

Have you tried a different card at all? You may want to search for this one. I have seen quite a few people having one problem or another with HL games in XP. Off the top of my head I can't think of any reason why your video card would affect your ping...

Hmmm. The only things I can think of to try, other than go back to the Dets you were using, is to download them again and/or try to get a hold of a newer version of the refresh rate fix. Clutch posted somewhere about some people having a corrupted download. I got mine off Nvidia's site, but they're not the official ones.

Try this: Go to Tools->Internet Options->Advanced. Under the list of Browsing options (it's the 2nd list) there's two Install On Demand options. Make sure the one for IE is unchecked.

Those with the GeForce 3 will see the biggest performance jump under XP. 150 points in 3DMark2001 is nothing to complain about with just a driver update.

Dirty Harry: I had to retweak everything when I installed the new drivers before things were back to normal again.

Did you try to use the refresh rate fix before you rebooted? If so, do the reboot after you install the drivers, then use the fix. This is what I ran into with them and how I solved my problem. It was under Win2k tho, so I can't be 100% sure it will work in XP.

[H]ardOCP is keeping things updated. Last update I saw, they had something about a new lead on the terrorists that carried out the attacks yesterday. I do hope that the US does retaliate against these cowards who murder innocent civilians for whatever cause. This was an unprovoked attack, not to mention another "day of infamy". I find it sick to find at least one group, the Palestinians apparently, rejoicing at this mass murder of Americans. I do wish that we find those who are responsible and demonstrate to them that people don't mess with America and get away with it. I don't care who did this, but I do want to see them pay for there terrorist acts. Hopefully their innocent civilians won't get caught up in this, but unfortunately this may not be preventable. War is ugly, but apparently some people want one.

Clutch had mentioned something about some people getting corrupted downloads of the 21.80's. May want to try downloading them again. I'm running them it 2k, and they are the first new dets I've used since the 12.10's when I went back to using the 10.80's which worked very well for me. These are really good, although I guess you can only get so much juice out of the card, no matter what driver you use.

Windblade: I don't remember right off the top of my head the exact directory, NetBEUI is with RC1 on the CD. It's not the Windows folder for sure though. It's also not supported, so your luck may vary. In Win2k, even with NetBEUI, which we all use at home here, WinME would still refuse to connect to 2k. Of course, that was one of the many reasons I stopped using ME.