mner70

Thanks for the informations!

The specs are: Pentium III 450 Elite P6BX-A+ 224 Mb RAM MSI GeForce2 MX Q. Fireball ATA 66 20.4 Gb SB Live Value Pinnacle PCTV Rave TV Tuner Supra MAX 56K USB Modem NEC DV-5500A DVD-ROM 8X and some other USB devices By the way searching this site I find that there is this key in the registry for NT: HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager SecondLevelDataCache It defines the amount of Second Level Data Cache the OS uses. The article says that NT always uses 256 (Kbytes) regardless the CPU (Mine for example has 512 Kbytes L2). So I digged in my registry and found that for my installation was 0 and not 256 (the installation is very, very fresh). I' ve changed it myself to 512 and everything still runs fine. After that what can I think about the memory management. Also what about the virtual memory? I've heard that you may have tons of RAM but if you don't have a pagefile the system may don't even boot. This is definitely true for Win9x but for Win2K I cannot verify this. Is it true? Linux (which I don't like very much) uses what ever it has and works well even with no swap file (partition) if you have enough memory)

I' ve recently reinstall W2k and on purpose I tried sacrifice demo, real myst demo, project igi and deus ex with the original DX7 of w2k and DX8.0a which I downloaded from microsoft web site. Except Deus Ex everything run slower with DX8 than with DX7. With DX7 and a fresh install of w2k the performance was good and maybe close with the performance on WinME which I also have installed but I do not have the numbers to really proof all that and really see how good is win2k with DX games against Win9x or Me. I use win2k for one year now. They are stable but they have problems, at least for me. I've noticed that under memory stressed conditions some applications fail to execute (For example Vision for PCTV Rave Tv Tuner card). My USB PSTN Modem (Supra max 56K) after 4 to 10 ten redials, when my ISP is busy, stops dialing and locks the port. To make it usable I must reinstall the drivers for it or reboot. My USB Radio tuner power offers every five to ten minutes. The only way to solve this is to launch the radio application with high or real time priority. In D3d all games flashes when I play them and this is very annoying (I have a MSI GeForce2 MX card with 6.49 Detonators). The sound crackles (SB LIve Value + Liveware3). These are problems that I had every time I have installed win2k in my pc. The weird thing is that with every installation problems arises that wasn't there before and they will not be in the next installation. I reinstalled Win2k yesterday because for no reason all my user accounts except my administrator acount stopped working. I wanted to reinstall before that because registry has gone to 30 MBytes even with everything extra uninstalled and the winnt folder was over 800 Mbytes. The problem with the uncontrollable growth of the registry is very annoying and the "reboot phenomenon" stays (maybe a little bit better this time). I also observed that some times under CPU or memory stress conditions the installations of some applications gets corrupted and need reinstall to start work again (It happened with real player 8 many times but only when I had 128 MB memory installed on my system and with some other programs. Task manager many times gives wrong readings about memory or cpu usage because it can't be half of the ram to be available and the cpu usage is low as 10% and notepad takes 10 sec to open. I wrote all these because I want to know if these are my problems or everyone has a share of them..!