Christianb

Okay I watched some movie on the Mac GUI and I must say visually it was extremely impressive. However I think more emphasis should be put on speed and stability and less on visual splendor. Both Apple and Microsoft are guilty in that regard. They should both loose the bells and whistles and stick to having a working product. I'm not saying Macs aren't stable. I do know that they are slow at web browsing, because the two largest web browsers IE (okay we all know MS wouldn't even consider letting another platform have faster IE code) and Netscape weren't nearly as fast the MAc OS 9. At least where netscape is concerned it just doesn't behoove them to spend a bunch of time optimizing a browser that's only going to be used by 3% of the market (AKA the Mac user base). All in all I think macs are great for a lot of things save gaming (no DirectX) and web browsing. Do check out the movies though. This GUI is really impressive. http://www.apple.com/macosx/theater/dock.html and there's a ton more: http://www.apple.com/macosx/theater/ -Christian

Hi I just wanted to say Half-Life works fine. It might freeze after 3+ hours of consecutive play, but otherwise it's okay. I don't think it got to be game of the year by being total garbage. However I only played Half Life single player so your multiplayer experience might be different. Let's face it everyone's anything crashes, and nobody releases anything "too stable". -Christian

From what I read the delays are related to lawsuits. They now have to make Windows 2000 support any web browser as the shell and a few other things I seem to have forgotten now. So they're making a major overhall to the OS. I think I read about it on CNET or Betanews, but it was about a month ago. Second they'll probably release Windows XP first to give all the Windows 2000 users the finger so they'll feel like they're not really being supported, which is exactly right.

My recomendation is that you return your Promise Raid setup ASAP while the store you bought it at will still take it back. Neither ASUS or Promise is going to give you your money back so take it back. I used to work at Microsoft in the Windows consumer hardware lab. I worked there through the release of Windows 98SE and a little of Windows 2000. I know hardware, I know drivers, I know the OS and I tried to get one of those Promise raid controllers to work and it was the single largest waste of my time ever. Not only that it will only work in crappy mode (the best that can be expected from a broken "Promise") if you reinstall windows. I used to do 30-70 installs of Windows a day it's fairly quick when you don't have to worry about propagating applications, settings, and data. However if you do have to move your old data over it can be extremely time consuming. I asked for my money back, they wouldn't give it so I sold that piece of garbage on Half.com (don't recall which). I'll give you my best advice - KISS: Keep it Simple Stupid. There are other raid controllers and they are all more complicated and more prone to incompatibilities and crashes. Sure if you have mirroring you might keep the data on the drive, but if your system crashes more often who cares. If you want more speed why not try a safer means of acceleration like the latest processor, a speedy new 3d card, or a gig of ram. Good Luck and I hope you return it, Christian Blackburn

The best game of all time is Lemmings. I especially like Lemmings 3 (The Chronicles), Lemmings 2 (The Tribes), and Lemmings The Revolution. Here's some other games I like. Half Life Quake II Unreal Tournament Descent II Multiplayer (I used to play that at night, and when I'd lie down I would float around in 3 dimensions[all in my head of course]). Pandemonium Nintendo: California Games Win 3.1: Pipe Dream Rodent's Revenge Dos Games: Brix Eittris (Dos and recently a Windows Freeware game) Jill of the Jungle (Dos Classic)

You might get the most recent DirectX. You might run DXDiag from the run command line. You might update your live sound drivers. Is an MSI KT3 a motherboard? Do other OpenGL and DirectX apps crash after a few minutes?

Okay somebody has to ask the stupid yet obvious questions might as well be me. Did you patch counterstrike with the most recent version? Did you change your CD drive letter since you installed? Do other games crash? Did you install any old directX apps? Anything Directx 3 (and possibly 5) and older will overwrite newer files! (good job MS, pass some of that white powder my way will ya!) Thanks, Christian

A conventional mouse is best for FPS because you can move far and fast with the highest precision. Trackpoints, trackballs, and spaceorbs are all awkward and unnatural they have their applications, but for speed and precision a standard mouse is best. For non-gaming I recommend an Addeso trackpoint keyboard (it's a natural keyboard with a trackpoint in the middle you never have to leave home row), but too bad they don't make them for the PC anymore. Just the Mac, what a bunch of friggin' idiots. Oh excuse I just checked their website now they're really stupid they don't even make their best product anymore. Unbelievable.

Do you have the drives plugged in correctly? Is the second drive bootable? (Win98 used to have problems with a slave drive being bootable. Hopefully they've fixed this. Course XP is NT based.) IBM has some great troubleshooting documents on their website: http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/rma/chkata.htm. I know you have Western Digital Drives, but their recommendations should apply 99% of the time. Good Luck

Do you have the latest motherboard bios, Win XP Sp1, and the latest disk controller drivers? Are there any drive quality updates for your drives? Did you run Western Digital's disk diagnostic on those drives?

Do your power management settings conflict with the 4am-8am defrag?

I have Windows 2000 Pro and so does my father. Don't we both have to install W2K Server to use Terminal Services?

It should also be noted that you may have to install a networking patch for Windows 98 to network properly with Windows 2000 machines. Good Luck, Christian

sure just map a network drive of the 2000 PC and then use the normal copy command. You don't even have to map the drive in your batch file. Just make sure the win98 PC has that network drive mapped.

Net Vampire was written in Borland Delphi the only native windows compiler to my knowledge. Even C++ apps have runtimes (msvcrt40.dll,... and the like). It's fast it only uses about 5,000K of memory. It has never made my browser crash unlike Real Download (Real Lame [internal development name]). I've used it for about 3 years. You can even have it power down your system when it's done downloading. I even use that feature to shut down my system after defragging. I just have it wait until 2am and download a single web page and then shut down. This app is addware I don't think it spies on you, it just displays adds as far as I know. I wrote in a few advertisement bugs for the author and he gave me the registration # for free (cool no?). The registration number turns off the ads. The downloader will let you add several locations and then it'll ping them all and show you which is the fastest. You can find it at HTTP://www.NetVampire.com Hope you like it as much as I do, Christian

Out of all your hardware the most bleeding edge seems to be the USB 2.0 controller and drive. Why not uninstall them both and see if your problems subside. Did you install the windows 2000 update for USB 2.0? Thanks, Christian

I think everyone has given good suggestions. It does sound like something simple, but lethal. You should first try looking for the obvious loose wires, (yes push down ever so lightly on the chips of all your cards and motherboard, make sure all your wires are connected firmly (electrical and data), make sure all your jumpers are on securely. Make sure your fans aren't clogged, especially the Power Supply. Remove 1 part at a time leaving all others in tact. You might find that a specific piece of hardware is failing you. Why not take your PC to a friends house or to work if they'll let you and plug each part in one at a time into another system at another location (in case you have electrical issues). You might just get lucky. You'll also want to try the Raid controller, each hard drive seperately and then together It could also be your Raid controller, promise makes the worst controllers. I swear why doesn't somebody make a raid controller that just emulates a single drive that you attach to the main IDE ribbon cable so the bios and OS are completely unaware of the situation.

You might be able to contact customer service and say I have the dos version can you send me the windows version? In addition to the abandonware sites you might also try ebay and half.com. Good luck to ya, Christian Blackburn

Did anyone bother to write NVidia and find out what that service does?

You should be able to save 5-20 seconds by disabling floppy scanning on shutdown. -Christian

I would recommend trying to get ahold of a slower video card. Try a matrox g200. Did you try reading the technical support for the program? or patching it? You should find great difficulty getting support. Stupid sony bought out Psygnosis and it's hella hard to get help with any of the old apps.

Caching Video Bios is fine, but don't let your bios cache your video RAM. This will cause major problems.

I was wondering if anyone knew how to use their USB ports to network two PCs? Do you have to get a special cable or does any old male to male cable simply work? Thanks in Advance, Christian Blackburn

I didn't even say I was sure I was going to do this. My article is just titled "Has anyone done USB Networking in Win2K". Actually I think USB networking would be most useful for backing up somebody's lap top that didn't have a NIC, but even then you can just throw a nic in it. I think I will try a firewire network though, with a Creative Audigy at some point, but I'm in no hurry 10/100 works fine for now. And I'll wait for Creative Audigy's drivers to stabilize. Since it's bleading edge technology right now.

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