TBone

Hmmm, the update seemed to have worked just fine for me. I was using a "hacked" version of liveware 3 before (i.e. I installed lw3 for win2k and then recopied devldr.exe from the XP disc). The only problem I'm having is that the midi port is completely non-functional. I can't remember the last time I actually jammed to a midi file, but it's the principal of the thing, I guess. I'm going to see if I can fix this by rolling back to the default windows drivers and doing it again from scratch. I've noticed that the new drivers fixed a number of problems with games based on the Unreal engine (ex. Deu***). For one thing, I can run the game with full sound acceleration without crackling and horrible bleed-through of ambient sounds. Plus, I can run at the highest resolution without any problems. With the old drivers I could only run at 1024x768 without turning the sound into a steady stream of static. Lol! It censored Deus Ex as one word! Stupid script!

I don't know about UT or Rune, but I have Deu***, and I can tell you that D3D performance is going to suck unless you download the D3D patch for 2k/XP. They've incorporated this into their main game patch, so I don't know if you can still download just the D3DDRV.DLL file without the patch. If that driver is part of the engine core, you might be able to use it to fix unreal or rune too. You might also have sound problems if you have an SB Live, but you can usually fix that by turning down the sound acceleration one notch. Otherwise the some sounds like voices may crackle and distort whenever there is a loud, low-frequency sound being played at the same time. I think this is an API issue, and might be fixed with Creative's upcoming Liveware release for XP.

I'm just curious, has anyone tried boot-time defragmenting with Diskeeper 6(SE)? I tried it once, and shortly thereafter I had all kinds of horrible drive errors. My system seems to have recovered, but I'll not be so quick to try it again. I didn't think there was any significant change made to NTFS for XP. Did Diskeeper screw me up, or was it just a random freak-accident? I've used Diskeeper for normal defragmentation and I've never had any errors from that, so I can't imagine why boot-time defragmenting would cause problems.

I can 100% gaurantee you that the problem lies in the SafeDisc copy protection embedded in runblack.exe. Thief 2 also uses SafeDisc and I had this kind of problem with it too. The only resolution was to use a no-cd crack. There is a crack for Black and White 1.0, but not for 1.1 (yet). Supposedly the 1.1 crack fixed this issue with 2000, but it didn't work for me, and for many people, it caused the game to quit working when it had worked before under 2000. I'd keep an ear to the ground with http://astlavista.box.sk until a 1.1 crack is available. Otherwise, use 1.0 with the no-cd crack.

Get Xtech Systems X-Setup (6.1). It has virtually every tweak you can imagine for all Windows OSes including some XP-specific tweaks. It does everything that tweakUI does, but it has about 5 times as many tweaks. It will even (mostly) hide settings that aren't for your OS version, so you don't have to guess if a tweak will work or not. It's a pretty slick program over all, and the best part is that it's free. You can get it at www.xteq.com. Be sure to get 6.1, not 6.0 since 6.1 has the new XP tweaks. My personal favorite is the ability to enable the undocumented manual crash feature. Just turn it on and when you hold Ctrl while you hit Scroll Lock twice, you get a lovely blue screen with the great message "THE USER ENTERED THE CRASH-DUMP" and then it reboots, lol Works in 2K, too!

Well, you could pull your drive(s) from the XP machine and do the conversion with partition magic from another computer (say, Windows 2000). Of course, I'm not sure that partition magic can even do that kind of conversion, anyway. Looking at it right now, I'm 99% sure there's no way to convert from NTFS 5.1 to NTFS 5.0 or 4.X. In fact, for some reason it won't even allow me to convert back to FAT32. But then, I haven't looked at PowerQuest's site for a while. They might have a patch or something for PM6.

Just thought someone might appreciate the humor of the situation... So I just installed Windows XP for the second time (I did a test-run on on old hard drive before I replaced my current OS, Win2K). I did a clean install, and everything seemed to work fine until I installed the LiveWare 3.0 drivers for Win2k. I got all kinds of crazy errors and thought, "Crap! There goes the neighborhood!" But I used the system restore function and then found someone's workaround posted somewhere around here, and everything was cool again. LiveWare 3.0 works and life is good. But then about an hour later I noticed that after rebooting my computer, I was getting periodic low-frequency "thumps" every minute or so on my speakers, which was really odd. Naturally, I assumed that something was wrong with the drivers, and I was about to go off the deep end again. But then I thought that maybe the mic. volume wasn't muted, but this didn't make any sense. Not only was the mic. volume muted, but I don't have a microphone plugged in at the moment! So I went back to my driver theory. I poked and prodded for about half and hour and then I noticed something really weird: If I listened really carefully to the back speakers, I could hear my cat purring, who at the moment was wandering around my subwoofer. AHA! That's when I noticed my _cordless phone_ was sitting right on top of my subwoofer. It was turned off, but the microphone apparently still picks stuff up and it was somehow bleeding over onto my speaker cables because that thing throws out all kinds of crazy radiation. I nearly fell of my chair when I realized I'd just spent half an hour trying to find some phantom LiveWare problem

Hard to say exactly what's going on since I don't know which 3 cards you tried, but I used to have this problem all the time under Windows 2000 and it turned out to be a result of excessive overclocking. If your CPU or PCI bus is overclocked any, turn it down some and see if the problem goes away. If you aren't overclocked, I don't know what to tell you. Could also just be a buggy PCI chip or northbridge controller. Check with VIA or whoever makes the chipset on your motherboard for the latest greatest driver.

There's a number of places you can find the AMD AGP large page minimum registry fix, including asus.com. Just go to the download section and from there, choose "other drivers". The DL is itty-bitty (less than 1k), and contains a simple .reg file. Alternately, go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management in the registry using regedit or regedt32 (this seem to be the same program in Windows XP). Then add a DWORD value called LargePageMinimum and set its value to ffffffff (that's 8 fs)

I know this isn't really a hardware question, but... Is it just my imagination, or does the "large fonts" and "extra large fonts" setting only increase the size of the title bar text? I know it could cause window size problems in 9x and 2k when you used large fonts, but at least I could read text! I'm a young guy with sharp eyes, but even at 1280x1024 I have problems reading quite a few fonts.

You might have already done this, but did you do a CRC check on the ISO and on the burned CD? The first time I D/Led it, the CRC failed because the file had gotten corrupted by Microsoft's sorry download program. If the same thing happened to you, there's an outside chance that something critical was part of what got messed up in the image.

Uh....405c? Where'd you find that. Last I could find, 404 is the latest, but maybe you know something I don't?