Brian Frank

You can change that under your profile, for your info.

Asus DVD is just Power DVD with an Asus skin, and as long as its 2.55 or higher, it should run, especially if youve bought your vid card recently.

Good thinkin on their part, hehe. LOL

Hmm, thats definitely not a good thing. Ive been less than impressed with FICs support in general from what Ive seen. You could try combing the driver updates for the info here on ntcompatible, but I dont know who would have them. Off the top of my head, I dont know of any place that has mobo makers drivers, but Im sure they're out there, but that does you no good. I'll try to remember to post a link here if I find a site with the drivers. If you end up getting a new board I suggest a Tyan Trinity K7 (Socket A, not the Slot A) or the Asus A7V. I know the A7V is awesome, and I have a P3 Tyan Trinity 400 and that is an excellent Pentium 3 board, plus Tyan makes a lot of server boards, so they will be very stable. If you plan to overclock, go with the Asus instead, because Tyan does not target overclockers at all.

Just a 20GB, I havent filled it up more than halfway yet, so a bigger one isnt necessary at this point in time. Ive installed all the apps I can and still dont need a bigger one. If youve got a lot of mp3s and stuff consider using that older Maxtor as a backup drive for that, at least thats what I would do.

Ive used it once and snagged a few items, but you're right, there are too many morons that dont have the mental capacity to label the songs right. That or the searching is screwy.

That should give em some leeway.

Im also assuming the 32 costs less. I bought it locally for $21. I guess Global Win screwed up with the markings, because it just looks like they use one box and mark it appropriately. I guess its better to have the fan hooked up to the PSU anyway. ;( Oh well, even with the warmer weather upon us, its now only getting to hit 50 C. Of course it was the hsf compound all along, go figure. ;( Ive already got a ton of fans in my case anyway, so that Delta fan probably wouldnt be as noticable as it would be on my P3 system. Thanx, Tim Bazzinett. Yeah, if we lived in the UK or the US, Id go for the 38, but the shipping charges for overseas just wouldnt make it worth it for either of us, BladeRunner. But thanx for the offer.

This post will never end... of course thats the fun of it.

Ft.Wayne, IN Amish jokes galore.

As long as youve got at least 128MB ram, and a decently fast cpu, at least 350 MHz, you should be alright. 64MB of ram under Win2k is not a pretty sight, since its beating you hard drive to death with the use of Virtual memory.

Hmmm, never run into that problem. I have a Hercules 3d Prophet II MX board, and I stopped using their drivers after I kept getting BSOD's after exiting Descent 3. I only use the Nvidia reference drivers, and those are the latest betas--12.00 dets. I also would suggest that you use the Win2K drivers, because there are specific ones for Win2k, so Im guessing thats what your problem is from what youve put up. I know Asus is quite thorough with their drivers, so there should be Win2k drivers on one of the asus discs. If not go to Asus website and get the drivers, or pick up the latest 12.00 Dets at this website.: http://www.the-ctrl-alt-del.com/ Im running fast write w/o a problem on an Asus A7V with a Duron and have had no problems. Well at least I know about GF2 cards under a P3 Via 133A setting. I have yet to replace my wonderful Voodoo 3 on my P3 system, but I'll probably pick up an MX card for it. So at least I'll know a fix for it if something like that pops up.

Oh, yeah Duke Forever. I dont remember them promising a date, but of course I could be wrong on that one. Remeber Duke3D? That was awesome! I still have a voodoo 3 3000, and that runs UT and HL just fine on the old test sytem. It certainly is nowhere near as fast as my GF2MX card(insanely overclocked), but it does the job with those two games. Im pretty sure that it wouldnt be as good for Serious Sam. I havent played too many games, but SS was the first jaw dropper since Duke3D. I havent had so much fun with a game. So far, since I first upgraded from a Cyrix 300 to a Pentium II 400, I havent had a problem running games. Games are the biggest pushers on technology, not the OS, although we may think that. XP needs at least a 300MHz cpu and 64 (or is it 128)MB of ram to run. Many games, besides Serious Sam have requiered that to run. If all games except 1 can run fine, I wouldnt be too worried. I'll star worriying when the requirements for games start doubling evey month.

I had run Mandrake on its own for a while, but I couldnt network the thing and it was just my test system. But I do look forward to running Linux in the future. I know Im severely incompetant in that arena, but its fun to mess around with. Im sure I'll have a real blast once I know what the hell Im doing. Im looking at SuSe, but Im still waiting for now.

Ive got a 5400rpm maxtor and have been very impressed by it. I dont put my machine on sleep mode but I do have the monitor and harddrive go on standby after an hour, and my system still wakes up in a few seconds. My other machine has a WD and it takes a little longer to wake up. Also, pcworld did a test on hard drives and Maxtor came out on top or neck in neck with IBM drives. I would highly recommend those drives, hands down. I also, have my swap file(pagefile, virtual memory) on its own partition. Maxtor comes with a very good formatting utility. Just have Win98 startup disk, as you can format to FAT32 right away. Dont use an ME disk as you cant format anything but FAT16. I use FAT32 instead of NTFS under Win2k, but thats a personal preference. I dont know of any gap in performance, although I believe there is a small difference, but not enough to discourage NTFS. NTFS is for secure files, so you dont really need it if your not holding something like financial stuff or top secrets. Yeah, the MX should be good enough for anything right now. Serious Sam can run on that thing smoothly (a fragalicious game to boot!).

Judging just by what Ive read about XP, I have no compelling reason to go there. However, Jdulmage, put up a post about WindowsXPLite---which basically takes XP and removes the stuff people wont use. The retail price is ~$25, but could drop to ~$20 if there's enough support for it. Im really more concerned with MS supporting 98/ME/2000 after they start pumping out XP. Ive seen something that hinted at 98/ME getting dropped as well as 2000:( Well, when Beta 2 comes in the mail, I'll try it out, and then see if I still dont have a good reason, other than looks to go to it. The only problem is the activation thing, but Im positive that wont be an issue.

Why dont you like Napster?

Sorry, I tend to get overzealous sometimes. I just dont think you really had a clue about game programming, and then went and made generalizations. Definitely not trying to start a flame war here if at all possible.

Go to FIC's web site and get the motherboard drivers for you motherboard!

In games, UT and HL (Im running a voodoo3 3000 AGP on the dual boot) I havent notice a difference. If you have optimal settings, you shouldnt notice a difference. I could list the tweaks Ive done, but the explanations would take too long, like I could probably write a small volume in the possible tweaks and it would be like putting down the encyclopedia britannica. Get Xteq Xsetup. My main rig is posted on the sig line, but heres my dual boot system as it is right now. Tyan Trinity 400 (Apollo Pro 133A) Pentium 3 667@700MHz 1.7Vcc on Asus Slocket Adapter 320MB PC100/133(mixed) at 100MHz Western Digital ATA66 5400rpm 17.2 GB hdd,4500rpm 2.5GB hdd Toshiba 12x DVD Voodooo 3 3000 at 184 MHz core clock SB 16 PCI Realtek 10/100 NIC PCI ISA SB compatible sound card. HP 1280 17" monitor MS Intellimouse Generic keyboard Win2k Pro SP1/WinME promo upgrade. I dont really like ME, and really dont advise people with 95/98 getting it unless its preinstalled with their new pc. The only games I havent got working are DOS games, so thats why I keep ME.

Thats a pretty small amount on the card there. I would strongly suggest that you get a new card to really show off that system. 8MB cards had their day, but even 16MB cards are considered old. Its probably the ram amount isnt cutting it. Also, make sure that youve got the latest update for MDK 2. If you do, or that update doesnt help, get a new card. Im not saying you have to, but your bottlenecking the P3 with that ATI card. Do you have any other games that you play. Good ones are Unreal Tournament--stresses cpu and ram more than graphics card, but having a better one wont hurt; Quake 3 Arena--very intesive game in general. If those games run decently at the same settings for MDK2, its probably something with MDK2 itself. I just wanted the other specs to see if you had enough meat elsewhere.

H@te to tell ya this, but ATI doesnt seem to have the most stellar drivers for gaming under Win2k. You could try a beta driver, but that card is so old, or not as well designed, so you may really want to think about getting a new card. MDK 2 is a pretty formidble game to push around with that card, so I suggest grabbing a GeForce 2 MX card and snagging the 12.00 detonators (betas) and run that. I also suggest the GF2MX to get is the Hercules 3D Prophet 2 MX 32 MB. The new 64MB is not worth the extra $50 spent because the performance is zilch. The 32MB is ~$100. I would highly suggest getting a new card, but could you post your motherboard, ram and cpu, so I could see if the ATI card is the bottleneck there.

Hey, Im overclocking my P3 on a Tyan Trinity via an Asus Slocket adapter. Ive only got the stock cooling on and the current voltage set at 1.7 volts how far can I push the sucker up in volts before its a major issue?

Well, I'll have to see, as I dont want to push it too much, but the slocket can support up to 2.2 volts 8) Wow! I think the board may not be able to run the 150MHz fsb. Well at least I got the 140 MHz FSB to run w/o a hitch, but of course, I'll push it up if I can. Thanx for the info,rgodart!

Yeah, Ive been thinkin it mightve been mislabled, as all the pics of the 38 have a fan grill an mine doesnt. My problem was that I had sorry thermal paste. I got some AMD approved stuff and that works marvelously. Someone screwed up, and it wasnt me.