auger

There's a lot of really useful info here. After much research, I think I'm going P4 2Gig with Abit TH7 Raid. The TH7 is highly tweakable and I haven't found any serious reports of problems. I've been on AMD of various stripes since 1997. Gonna give Intel a whirl this time around. Rationale: stability, memory bandwidth and a much narrower gap in price diff as of late. SCSI is a bit out of my league at the moment but I think I'll do ok with my IBM ATA 100 7200 drives. Thanks all for posting. Cheers.

Really leaning toward the P4 2G with Samsung Rambus. Lots of good suggestions here. I can get the P4 2 for $499 CDN; the XP 2100+ is $435. I can get 4 x 256 Samsung Rambus PC 800 sticks for $558; 2 x 512 Micron DDR for $498 or 2 x 512 Kingston for $558. There's not a lot of price diff here & I'm thinking the stability plus-side of the Pentium based system will be a big payoff. Then there's the memory bandwidth advantage which is icing on the cake. Will keep researching, thanks for all the comments and thanks for not flaming me over the cross post! Cheers all.

I'm now leaning toward a P4 2G system. Mainly because Rambus memory is looking much more affordable. Lotsa homework to do...thanks for the input. Been looking at the Lian Li cases too. Sweet!

Going to build my first sorta-kick-*** home system. Long overdue. I'm leaning Athlon XP 2100+ w/ Asus A7V266e motherboard, Volcano 7 Fan, Enermax 350 watt ps and 1G Micron PC 2100. Half assed considering one of the new 333 based chipsets. USB2 woudl be good. Haven't even ruled out a P4. I do a little gaming, lotsa web dev and tons of Photoshop and some video. Will be running Win2K/98 but maybe XP instead. If you were going to build a basic but kinda high end box, what would you build and why?

This MB sucks. AMD Irongate (Northbridge) AMD 756 Viper (Southbridge). Absolute nightmare with my 768M PC133 non-name & Athlon 550. Buying new stuff. What should I get? Not into hard core gaming.

Going to build my first sorta-kick-*** home system. Long overdue. I'm leaning Athlon XP 2100+ w/ Asus A7V266e motherboard, Volcano 7 Fan, Enermax 350 watt ps and 1G Micron PC 2100. Half assed considering one of the new 333 based chipsets with USB2. Haven't even ruled out a P4. I do a little gaming, lotsa web dev and tons of Photoshop and some video. Will be running Win2K/98 but maybe XP instead. If you were going to build a basic but kinda high end box, what would you build and why?

It's on the recommended AMD list and happens to be the board they used to benchmark the XP2100+ I'm looking at buying both based on that.

Having serious problems with ATI All In Wonder 128 on Win2k SP2. System freezes while watching TV after just a few minutes. System will freeze after a few hours while not watching TV. Temps all ok. Has anyone had success with this card? Have all the latest drivers & ATI software. ATI is NO help. Lots of posts on the net with similar probs but have not seen a fix. Re-formatted, no dice, same probs. MSI 6195 MB with latest BIOS. Athlon 550 768 M RAM Sohoware Ethernet is ONLY other card installed. Dual booting 2K/98. 125MB boot part on FAT 16 is drive C. Drives D,E & F are NTFS/2K and drive G is Win 98SE FAT32. All help appreciated. Thanks in advance.

HP is apparently struggling with fixes for many of their printers under Win 2K. I installed the P1100 with the NT drivers using the Have Disk method but the PC will not boot with the printer connected in parallel. The printer does not show up in Device Manage not even as IEEE or 'Other Device' doing this BUT...after booting with printer cable disconnected, I can re-attach the cable and the printer works ok. If I let Windows detect new hardware (in parallel) it sees the printer but hangs and freezes with a CPU spike when it tries to find drivers. This is a hassle for a very expensive printer! $%#@ Check out the solutions at the HP website forums... http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/eng/gateway_forums.htm ...click on the 'digital imaging - photosmart' link. HP has people monitoring the forums that MAY be able to help. There's a bunch of known conflicts (Roxio, various virus scanners etc.) that HP seems to think is behind all this. I think it's deeper than that. Good luck (seriously).

I'm using the HP Photosmart 1100 printer on Win 2K with parallel. The drivers for 2K @ the HP website do not work. They hang my system (no virus scan, no Roxio etc.) during install. The HP Forum is full of posts with people trying to run the 1100 on Win 2K and there are a lot of frustrated users. HP doesn't seem to have an answer that they will publish but they'll gladly talk you through some 'registry tweaks' they claim will work for $25 if your warranty has expired. I saw (here) that the NT4 drivers will work in parallel. Tried it and they do work although I can't have the printer connected to the parallel cable at boot or the machine hangs on the white 2K spash screen. If I boot with printer disconnected, the machine boots fine. I can then connect the parallel cable and it seems to print just fine. Does anyone have any experience and/or suggestions? Thanks in advance.