BloodRedDragon

Hopefully not too fresh, but bad driver support isn't good.

I'm using Windows Firewall and IPSec filtering rules for bi-directional port blocking. Is this good use of free tools that come with XP for creating a bi-directional firewall, or is it nonsense? If you think it's nonsense, please explain.

This isn't like the grand ol' days of NT4.0 where there was an effort to see what apps/games would run on it, and if there were any fixes or workarounds for the ones that didn't. W2k was a major upgrade from NT4.0, and thus left plenty to talk about. XP's release followed close on the heals of W2k, and gave plenty more to talk about for its problems and being the first NT-based OS marketed to the masses. Now, XP is much improved, and, given Microsoft's track record with XP's initial release, Vista might very well be freshly released flatulence in 2007.

Just thinking out of the box here... With the second processor added, and the new video card that may well be pulling more power than the old one, perhaps the power supply might be coming a up a little short. Not that I've experienced a problem like this, but it may be worth testing if you have an extra one (preferably stronger) laying around, as strange things can happen when there isn't enough juice to keep things running properly.

This is what I've upgraded my computer with recently: 2.6Ghz P4 800Mhz FSB/Intel D875PBZ 2x Crucial 256MB PC3200 ECC memory (512MB total) 2x Seagate 7200.7 80GB 8MB cache SATA hd's in RAID-1 Not exactly blistering fast by todays standards, but its a screamer compared to the 1Ghz P3 it replaced. Very stable, too, which is what I was really looking for. Only downside that I noticed recently after perusing the Intel website for information about the Extreme and Prescott processors is that my mobo is one digit short on the revisions from being able to use them. That's okay, as I'll be using what I have for a while.

Well, my budget is prett tight, so even the sound card might wait a while. In relation to the video card upgrade, I'm definitely waiting for the release of Doom 3 to see how well the different cards fair with it.

Hopefully, there will be a sub-$200 budget conscious version of the 6800 later this year capable of spewing playable frame rates on Doom 3 at 1024x768 with everything maxed on the visual settings. For now, I'll save some money for an Audigy 2 ZS to replace my ancient PCI64 that's been hanging on since the glory days of Socket 7, while the 128MB GF4MX440-8X continues busting its balls to belt out playable frame rates in UT2004 demo with all the detail settings crank up along with 4x anti-aliasing at 1024x768.

There was a time when low CPU clock speeds and high utilization from non-DMA IDE drives made SCSI very attractive, even on a single user desktop system.

Originally posted by Tomay: Quote: Read this: http://www.dansdata.com/io031.htm Quote: SCSI super-drives aren't a good choice for desktop machines. A high-priced 15,000RPM SCSI hard drive may well load a big fat game slower than a commodity 7200RPM drive. This is because SCSI server drives top out at capacities well under 100Gb, while commodity drives with capacities well above 200Gb are commonly available. If you've got three times as much capacity, three times as much data passes under the heads per second. That triples your sustained transfer rate, all other things being equal (which they won't be - number of platters is a factor - but never mind that for now). A 15,000RPM 73Gb drive is only mechanically capable of 61% of the sustained transfer rate of an otherwise similar 7200RPM 250Gb drive. From all of the hard drive testing I've seen online, that theory doesn't hold water. There is, however, other things to keep in mind. If you go cheap and get an older version of a 10000/15000rpm SCSI drive, you may very well find that a current sata or ide 7200 rpm drive is faster. Also, from personal experience, the overhead (time-wise) of the SCSI bus seems to negate the effect of the faster access times of the drive unless its pushed hard (multiple I/O requests, especially among multiple drives - what SCSI is designed for). And there's always the noise factor with 10000/15000rpm drives.

You need to stick with the same type of ram(ECC registered). Something else to keep in mind is cas latency settings. For instance, if you have ram rated for cas2 and your computer is set for cas2, putting cas3 ram in it might cause problems and you would need to set your computer to cas3. Obviously, if you back off the timing like that, you'll slow down your computer a hair. K PS->I've been able to use different brands of ram together. The biggest concern is making sure they have the same specs.

I have Fury 3, and it does run on W2k and XP, but it sucks. But you need to keep things in perspective with the original Win95 games, as they were as quirky as the operating system. K PS->Is there any OpenGL ports of Duke Nukem 3d?

I think Cynan was asking if it's terminated or not. Whether you have one drive or several drives on the chain, the last drive on the chain still needs to be teminated. Since you have only one drive on the chain, obviously you only terminate that drive. K

Running W2k Pro and XP Pro on dual p3 1ghz system with 768 MB ram and GeForce2 GTS. I have sp2 installed on W2k and 23.11 detonator on both os's along with the same Via agp driver. I've tried Quake 3 Arena with the latest patch and settings maxed, and my framerates on both os's are about the same. K

Quote: there will probably never be an end to this debate and personally i think those tests aren't fair when comparing materials simply due to the fact that the design of the heatsink itself plays a very important role. what would be interesting to see and end this debate is to see 2 heatsinks made of the exact same design with the exact same fans on the exact same testbed, with only one exception, the material, one being pure aluminum while the other being pure copper. that would definetly end this debate. This is very true. The variations in the design of the heatsinks and the fans used make it impossible to truely compare the materials. Also, your idea is good, but it probably wouldn't end the debate. It's likely one design would not effect both materials equally, and that could unfairly bias the results toward one type of material. K

I'm running 21.83 on XP with dual p3's, Via chipset and Geforce2. Might switch to 23.11 soon, since Win2000 is running rock solid on it. K