Brian Frank

Perfect disk is slow as hell. Disk keeper is the best 3rd party defragger, but speed disk is okay too.

Go to the manufacturer of your hardware. Get latest driver for your product. Update driver. Reboot. If hardware no longer functions, swear at computer until the box slaps you around. Hehe.

Well to repartition your hard drive you can either A.) Reformat it the way you want it and reinstall from scratch; or B.) go buy a partition utility, like Partition Magic 6.0. Win2k should automatically setup the bootloader by default, but check to see if you have it enabled. Heres how to do that: Right click on MY COMPUTER, go to Properties,Advanced, Startup and Recovery. There, make sure the box for "Display a list of Operating Systems for xx seconds" is checked. Also, you can set which OS you want to be the default. If that doesnt work, try running the repair option off the Win2k CD. Boot off of it like you would to install, except instead of hitting 'Enter' to install, hit 'R' to repair (no quotes). Just choose the Fast repair,'F', and have Win2k CD look for the Win2k install by hitting 'L' after that. It shouldnt matter if you install all the drivers in 98 first though. I havent used Fdisk in a looooong time. I prefer to be a sissy and use the Maxtor Max Blast floppy to partition my drives. You can only partition them as FAT16 (I dont know why in today's uses) or FAT32, and you just need a 98 startup disk for the system files. Just to check: You do have both partitions as FAT32 right? If you dont that could be your problem, but Im not really sure thats correct, but the same filesystem on a multiboot with Windows helps a great deal.

Sweet!

Yes. Win2k can be installed on, and therefore read, NTFS, FAT32, FAT16, FAT12(not advisable to install on FAT16 or 12) without any issues. Just so you know, if you do a dual boot, FAT 32 is the way to go. And another thing, please dont post the same thing in two different parts of the forum. Thanx.

Yup.

I wonder if that guy is still preching about OS/2. True, Windows is not 100% perfect, but is any other OS? Whatever works best for you should be what you use, if possible. I think many Linux lovers realize that they have a long way to go before they really are a threat to Windows like any other OS. Linux needs to get organized too, as there are a zillion distrobutions out. Im not saying thats a bad thing, but youve still got RedHat and Debian types of distros. While I dont like the current crop of the corporate evil (Bill Gates and Microsoft), they are organized with the OS's and with XP they are having one code for both the work and home OS's. Linux is not gonna go anywhere until things get sorted out. I dont care how great the latest kernel is, Linux is like a chicken with its head cut off. Im not cracking on Linux, but I would like to point out some things that I think are issues that need to be addressed for the advancement of this OS.

Sweet! Any word on the release date?

The last useless post was "I dont mean to piss everyone off..." We could start with another worthless post here on this one, as Ive been missing a post for purely screwing around in.

No problems, except that UT loads really slow between the levels. Im not gonna uninstall for that. Im crazy, not stupid.

Actually Im working on a geocities website for myself, so I'll link it there when Im done. I wonder if Im putting too much effort into something so little...NAH! I'll fix it, hopefully today.

Well, here's my main rig pix at my web page: http://www.geocities.com/bjgrifter1/Franknet_mainpg.html?989994767075

There! Thanks for the help, cardinal! I learned a new trick--groovy. .... Grrr... screw that, heres the link to my desktop: http://www.geocities.com/bjgrifter1/Franknet_desktop.html

Im clueless on that one, since Ive never had a board that used raid, but I do have two boards that have an extra pair of controllers on them (Asus A7V and Abit BE6). I guess promise is good, but never having used raid, I cant say. I know Adaptec is pretty big when it comes to scsi, but I dont know about RAID.

Dual Athlon 4 (Paliamino, what the hell is with Athlon 4, other than marketing?) will be sweet.

You cant go wrong with Asus. Tyan boards are good, unless you want to overclock--you will be lucky to pull that off, but other than that those are good boards. Tyan is working on the dual Athlon with the 760MP chipset(drool). I dont know if Abit has a DDR board out yet, but that would be another choice too if they do. I dont know much about Iwill other than what Ive read, but they seem to be pretty good. A local tech at the only MS certified pc store said only get Asus or Abit, and if you cant afford those MSI or DFI. I'll agree with him on all but the last one with DFI. But of course, the best, although pricey, is Asus or Abit. Ive also heard that a lot of people like MSI too, but I would definitely look at Asus. Depending on what you have in hardware, I would really suggest waiting, because not only are cpu's changing now, but the fight for the memory standard is being fought, so with first gen products, wait and see till the Athlon 4/ Pentium 4 war gets on the main stream in few months. Basically, unless your hardware sucks right now, yeah, chill a bit for like 4 months and then look around. You'll at least know what bugs are there.

I would hold off on a DDR board right now, mainly because there the very first ones, so there's bound to be more problems. Also, the Magik chipset can be beaten by the KT133A chipset in most benchmarks, so essentially, you're paying more for the same performance WITHOUT DDR. The only DDR chipset worth fooling with is the AMD 760, but I couldnt recommend this either, since it is a first gen product. But if you must have a ddr board, go with one featuring the AMD 760. And as for sound--c'mon, you know the good sound comes from hardware based ones. The performance, if anything should increase if you disable the onboard sound. However if its a good hardware onboard sound (oxymoron) you should be able to have it on without any, or just a little, decrease in performance.

Eye candy is cool, dude (huh-huh, huh-huh, yeah, Beavis!)

No, you need those for the card to work with media---unless you want to have a sound card and no sound. Leave the codecs in or you wont have them. Disable the legacy support, but dont remove it, otherwise Windows will reinstall them everytime you reboot.

HL is the only game your having trouble with, right? Now that I think about it my sound card does have a little wackiness to the sound with EAX and A3D turned on. Try playing around with that setting. I just got used to it, but now I might play around with that later on. I only notice it in the Black Mesa Inbound part at the beginning though.

List the specs, because I dont know all these different drivers, and seeing your hardware will give a better picture of what we're dealing with here.

I would also look at the Philips Acoustic_______ for a replacement. I have a no longer produced Guillemot Maxi Sound Fortissimo, and have had no problems with it. It works right out of the box under Win2k, although there are drivers for it, but I am happy w/o them. For me its good enough, but if your used to creative quality, Id either look at the Santa Cruz line or Philips sound cards. Creative and others who dont support Win2k are idiots, because when XP comes out they wont be able to ignore that, or they will be toast. Seeing as how so many people have a creative Live! card with problems, as well as some other creative card too, I probably will not buy one ever either. Im not gonna get any product that has issues with an OS, because a company refuses to put out drivers.

I havent had problems so far, but SP2 is just recent, and Im not totally sure its fine, so proceed with caution. Ive seen a few people around here having probs with SP2 already, just a warning to you, otherwise I would say go for it.

I have run SP1 on my machines with no ill effect that I have seen.

Do you have a splitter jack so you can have both the fron speakers and something else plugged into it on the front outputs. I have a completely different card (Maxi Sound Forissimo) and I only get one side if Ive got two things feeding off the sound. I can hear it fine if I use headphones though...