Sampson

Your description of the problem is a little foggy. Did you just put a new computer on your network? If not, was it working previously? I am presuming that the modem is connected first to the Router and that the HomeXP is connected then to the Router as are the other computers. You use the plural "Workgroups." Normally, workgroups are assigned to a clusters of computer so that they are grouped "logically." As small as your network is (three computers), you should have only one workgroup. You said that you used the internet wizard for the XPHome machine. Best to avoid that thing since there are toggles you can miss. Remove all your shared directories from the XPHome Machine. Make sure that it is in the Workgroup assigned to your other machines, and then use Windows Explorer to set up your shared directories. Temporarily, while you are doing this, close down your Windows Firewall.

If your motherboard says that it is AGP 2.0, it supports AGP 4X, so if you want to go to AGP, the FX5200 will work. On the other hand, the FX5200 also comes in a PCI version; so if you are in a quandry about your AGP support, buy the PCI card. The FX5200 was designed as a low-end graphics card mainly for business computers. It can play games but don't set your expectations too high.

You have a lot of questions. Video cards - either that you mention ought to work. They will not be stellar performers since they were not designed for game play. You will need to change the driver from the Savage3d, which is your onboard video, to Standard VGA for whichever of the cards you choose. You should do this in Windows before you change the setting in BIOS to use the new card. After you have changed the video driver in Windows to Standard VGA, power down the computer, put in your new card, power back up, but before it brings up Windows get into the BIOS and default it to the AGP slot. Save the new configuration. Bring up windows and then install the drivers for the specific card. As to the memory - that board can support both SDRAM and DDR. Everest may be confused by that. It is best to stay with the recommendation of the motherboard manufacturer. You can mix sizes, but what you shouldn't mix are the timing and latency. Use a program like CPUZ (freeware) to give you the info you need. As to the "loss" of memory - that used to be a standard operating procedure since the onboard video shared system memory as a frame buffer. Once you get your new card going, you can go back into the BIOS and release the memory if you want. Finally, despite the new card, you have to keep in mind that some of these games are CPU intensive no matter how fast the video card or the amount of memory. Increasing the memory on your machine will certainly speed it up, but it will change nothing as to the raw horsepower of a fast CPU needed by some games.

It is certainly possible for you to have picked up some spyware. In addition to your virus protection you really need to use Ad-aware and Spybot Search and Destroy. I have seen this happen mostly on Win98 machines when multiple processes are cached to the hard drive, and for whatever reason, it seems to take ages for the screen to update. You can "speed up" your screen writes by choosing a lower quality color driver (reducing it from 32bit to 16bit) or lowering the resolution. This is the least intrusive thing to try first. To change these settings, right click on a blank portion the the desktop, choose Properties from the the drop down menu, click on the Settings tab and you will see the two settings referred to above. Try lowering the color settings first.

That board ought to be compatible with the celeron since it is a Socket 478. Check the board to make sure that it is set for 400MH since it is capable of running at 533MH.

You might want to run some of the spyware programs like Ad-Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy. Since you are using Win98, it might just be time for a clean install. Colloquially speaking, Win98 suffers from "dry rot." Not a very good technical term; it just means that drivers and .dlls lose their "resiliance" not also to say that with repeated installation and re-inststallation other programs have left a residue on the hard drive and often in memory that bogs a system down. Backup all your data; get out our disks and clean format the thing. You can find the unofficial Service Packs for Win98 here: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4131.html if you don't have a fast connection to Microsoft to update your original CD.

Two free anti-virus programs are Anti-Vir: http://www.free-av.com/index.htm or AVG: http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_index.php

More often than not, this error is telling you that there is a memory conflict sometimes from bad Ram, sometimes from video ram, sometimes with the conflict between system ram and the video, and sometimes from drivers wanting particular memory addresses already held by another process. Since you have replaced the Ram, you could try just one stick to see if the problem is between the motherboard's support of two sticks. I don't know of any compatibility problems between 9800pro and that motherboard. Personally, my primary suspect is the Norton System Works. It is a Swiss Army knife and while it does a lot, you are often better off using the right tool rather than something that is useful when there is nothing better to use. Norton's stuff is peculiar and it is not above substituting its own .dll's for those of Microsoft's. The XP system is supposed to track where programs are stashing their functions, but System Works is duplicating this and it may be falsely masking what the system is reporting. In any case, since you don't seem to mind tearing this thing apart, start from scratch and clean install XP with just the hardware bare essentials. Do not put the Norton's back on until you have run the machine through its paces and it doesn't reboot on you. If it does continue to give you errors, make sure that you have the proper timing on the memory. Remove all the ATI drivers and run it as a standard VGA for a while or you could put in a different video card to see if you still get the random reboots. Unfortunately, this is one of those problems were who have to eliminate one peripheral after another until you are left with just the motherboard as the last suspect.

Why exactly is this post on "Latest Threads" when the fellow who had the original request stopped responding in March of last year?

It is indeed unfortunate that you may have only had your system a week, but it is not too early for spyware. You should, if you haven't already, download Microsoft's AntiSpyware, Ad-Aware, and Spybot Search and Destroy. Run them all first. Then go here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/download/download.aspx to download the Windows Media file and reinstall it.

As Alec stated there is a lot of housekeeping going on in the background. This used to be a notorious shortcoming of Win98 especially as screensavers tended to fill Ram and the hard disk churned like a washing machine in response. If you are concerned (though WesternDigitals are considered to be very stable) you could run chkdsk and then defragment the hard drive to make your disk is more "breatheable", in other words, more contiguous. This should re-index the drive and provide more contiguous space for data. I would suggest that you might want to invest in a good defragment program. The names of two I am familiar with and use are PerfectDisk and O&O.

First, this has nothing to do with the File system. Microsoft handles seeing the different file systems fine on a network. One area to explore is the firewall on the XP machine. More often than not it is the native firewall that has to be tweaked. The second area to look at is how you setup the shared folder. If you go through XP's wizard rather than a straight share through Windows Explorer there is likely a toggle that may have been missed. Sometimes, you have to cold boot the whole system - that is, turn all of them off and bring them up one at a time. Try these things first but don't mess with trying to switch out the file systems.

I am presuming that you are using XP and IE 6.0 and that you have done all the updates. This is how Micorsoft says to repair the problem: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=318378. On the other hand you can issue this command at the Run command: rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 132 %windir%\inf\ie.inf . But, if she has a popup blocker running in the background (other than the one provided by SP2, you may have to disable it). Further, because you don't know where she has surfed and what is in her registry, you would not hurt yourself by downloading Ad-Aware, Spybot Search and Destroy or Microsofts own AntiSpyware and running them to find any rodents planted on her machine. You should do these before attempting to repair IE. Finally, if all these fail, I would suggest downloading Crazy Browser. It is the smallest of those IE based browsers and looks and acts closest to IE but allows tabbed browsing. Once she experiences tabbed browsing she will not go back to IE.

Either of the two replies given would probably do the trick for you. You might look at Star Downloader since it is free. But, if you are timing out or you are bumping into some memory walls, you might want to go to http://www.dslreports.com/ and choose Test and Tools and then choose the Tweak Test to tune up your TCP/IP connection for broadband. DSLReports are supplies a free piece of software to allow you to change your settings without having to physically go into the registry to do so.

I am not exactly sure why this is happening to you. On the other hand, rather than spending a lot of time figuring it out, it seems that what you want to do is use a browser with multiple tabs so that you can open more than one site simultaneously. There are a number of free browsers that are built on IE that will do this - Maxathon, Avant, Slimbrowser, and Crazy Browser. Given that these browsers are susceptible to the same security holes as IE, I would suggest that you use one of the Gecko based engines like Firefox, Mozilla, or K-Meleon. Finally, by paying a small fee, there is Opera.

Are you asking how to install the drivers for the new card?

Reading stop messages can be a fruitless endeavor. Generally, after electrical surges, particularly on older machines, the hard disk takes the hit. The next in line can be the ethernet card and serial port, then the ram, and finally some component on the motherboard.

Try here to get started, but don't take it as the end all: http://www.motherboards.org/

Download a program like CPU-Z and run it. It will tell you what the CAS and the latency of your memory on the Dell is.

I tested Giant before Microsoft bought it out. It was a pretty nice program. It is proactive rather than a retroactive program in relation to catching spyware. This means it runs in memory and tries to shield your machine before a "suspicious" cookie or a registry entry can be made. Unless you get the Subscription Ad-aware package, Ad-aware can only retroactively find what has already been downloaded to your computer and then eliminate it. I presume that Microsoft bought Giant because it offers this feature. PestPatrol was the other proactive pest controller, but it was purchase by Computer Associates.

There are no guarantees. Dell makes a fine computer as long as you keep everything Dell. There are certain tweaks that give their machines an edge and memory is one of them. It is possible that you can add the generic type of memory if you know the latency. Generally, these are in increments of 2.0. 2.5, and 3.0. Memory is cycle/timing based as it refreshes. You have a better shot at compatibility if you know the rate of your Dell memory.

When installing any nvidia card, you must first uninstall the old drivers. I think that is what you meant to type. Some will also suggest that you use either Driver Cleaner or Detonator R.I.P. to be sure to clean out the old drivers completely. Most of the time, this will work. What may be a kink in your installation is whether or not your AGP slot in your Pavillion is 2X or 4X. You need to find out. If the MX4000 is 4X and your Pavillion can only support 2X, it will never work. The old MX400 would work even with a 1X emulating 2X

You can share the "whole computer" by making the entire C:\ drive shareable (in other words, the root directory) the same way that you make an individual folder shareable. It is not something you would want to do normally, especially if you are on the net, particularly a broadband connection.

There is a well-known bug in Explorer whenever an html file contains a sequence that invokes the shlwapi.dll . To be on the safeside run a virus scan, ad-aware, spybot search and destroy, and clear out your cache and cookies.

Usually, the more information you give, helps to diagnose the problem. Presuming that you are using XP, what kind of CD-Rom is it (brand name). Was it working previously and then quit working? Had you changed operating systems? Is this a new hardware installation in an old setup? Remember that CD roms do have their own firmware/software updates? Knowing your CD Rom drive, you may be able to do a firmware update that will allow the content of the drive to be visible. Also, keep in mind that a Readable/Writeable drive uses software that is not visible to Windows Explorer unless it is running in memory.