Sampson

This is one of those executive summaries from ZiffDavisReviews about the Netvista: "IBM computers are known for their conservative performance and the NetVista X41 lives down to that goal. Though based on a 1.8GHz Pentium 4, it's saddled with SDRAM and an integrated, last-generation graphics system. Compared to decked-out RDRAM systems, that's a recipe for mediocre performance. Pitted against rivals with a similar memory type but cutting-edge graphics cards, the X41 suffers only in our Office productivity test, its score falling about 10 percent below that of the competition. Three words about 3D: don't go there." It is a P4 system; not a Celeron and it is saddled with some pretty "slow" video cards. Don't know what kind of SDRam it has, but would guess it is no barnburner either. Your best option - return it.

Is this Dirty Harry or Caius Caligula speaking?

Whenever it comes out, it would be a good idea for those who love tweaks to inventory the ones they have made and set them to their original default before installing SP3. The original Microsoft Word contained the text "only the shadow knows" in their hidden file so that Word could not be pirated. Sometimes omnipotence, even if only implied, should be treated like a sleeping dragon. Best to keep things close to where SP2 left off.

I agree with Davros. A plain adaptor is sometimes not enough. There are voltage issues and the powerleap products also use "steps" in their configuration of the CPU and motherboard. You also have to look at the Tualatin you're interested in using - whether it is fsb100 or fsb133. There is a compatibility page on the powerleap website where you can see if your board has been successful in accepting their product. It is the safest recourse.

Well put, Bladerunner, and if I could, I would like to say that there can be a further childishness in relation to VIA drivers which is often found in installing the "latest and greatest" when in fact there was no need to change them to begin with for a specific motherboard.

Clearly, you need more memory to run XP, and as Galilee points out 256 is minimum. What is the speed of the processor? Are you sure it is a Celeron?

The mystery of Microsoft. Apparently, 256 is baseline and starts at 0.

This depends on the size of the L2Cache. Use this chart as a guide: SecondLevelDataCache for 256kB Level 2 Cache = 0 for 512kB Level 2 Cache = 200 for 1024kB Level 2 Cache = 400

This generally happens when something is running in the background and will not release. If you have an SBLive card, its drivers, for whatever reason, sometimes will not close down.

There are other drivers available: http://mallkun.to/rush/driver/v3-w2k-10300.exe http://download2.filefront.com/pub3/drivers/v3/v3-w2k-figs-1.02.00.exe What sometimes happens is that the opengl portion of the drivers is not copied to \winnt\system32. Check to see if they are. In 98se these are usually found \windows\system

Try this: http://www.majorgeeks.com/article.php?sid=1268

OK, So, the Primary IDE has two hard disks and the Secondary IDE has both the Plextor and LS-120? The rest is SCSI. Is this how you have it all connected? If so, do the Hard disks get DMA support? Just asking to see if there is the controller card issue in relation to XP.

XP and for that matter W2K do have issues with some hard disks in starting programs after a period of time Look at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q310419. Since yours is new system, several things suggest themselves - not enough Ram, hard disk is not configured with DMA support, video card or drivers are not optimized. As others have indicated, give your system specs as a first step to diagnosing the more common bottlenecks. edit by clutch Fixed link. /edit

If your Plextor could burn a CD without crashing, it is probably set to PIO 4. Slow but it should continue to work You've probably already done this, but it never hurts to mention it. Make sure that the Plextor is the master and your LS210 is the slave on the secondary IDE channel. You set this through the jumper at the back of each drive. Undoubtably, you've done this since you were so thorough to this point. So, next -- this drive is reputed to have a difficult time with XP. You shouldn't install the plextor software. Make sure that the firmware is the most recent. (1.04 I think). Looked at your "Click here to see the rest" - you have a number of devices DVD, CDrom competing for DMA, are you using your primary IDE for the DVD and CDrom and the hard drives through SCSI? Have you thought of putting the LS120 on with the DVD and combining the CdRom with the Plextor?

Are you using a Hotmail account? Outlook Express has some issues with Hotmail accounts one of which is delays.

Apparently, this card does have some difficulties on some systems especially with XP. The card should not be sharing an IRQ with the hard drive. You may have to shift some of your cards around or if you can through the bios assign it an IRQ other than the hard drives. There is a download from ATI specifically for XP: MMC_7_1_TVWONDER.exe however some find that Cyberlink PowerDirector for capture and editing is superior. I have found some registry edits, but look at these issues first.

Apparently, the Mad Onion Management removed the "expose." Mr. Natural, a Timothy Sanders, who is a computer guru and store owner in Florida, became suspicious of OCZ products, quality, and manufacture. He alleges that they are little more than a web operation whose only physical attribute is a storefront in Indiana. He made pictures of their facility, and if true, means that at best OCZ took generic memory and tested for higher quality and represented it as their brand or at worst shipped whatever came their way. The "expose" was left on the message boards of Mad Onion for a couple of days. Then, it was pulled. There is a remnant of the discussion that seems to be ongoing about freedom of expression and the decision of the administrators of the message board to pull the "expose."

sapiens74 Couldn't help noticing the OCZ brand of DDR. What do you make of the commotion at Mad Onion and Mr. Natural's expose about OCZ?

Don't know if this will help, but these guys at this message board really mix it up when talking about Sis Via and Intel. You might want to read their comments: http://bbs.pcstats.com/intelzone/

As a physical file, it generally is found as a hidden file in your root directory \pagefile.sys. Have never seen a task called pagefile in the task manager. When I disabled mine, the file stayed there though there were very few bytes in it. It has been a long time since I did it, I recall there also being a second file working with it. To get it off the hard disk completely I had to go through the console to delete both files. Since my system started acting peculiar after that, I went back and let Windows manage it. What I meant to say is that from the original install of windows a pagefile.sys is created as default. In my case when I disabled it later, the file remained. I was able to erase it. I didn't mean to say that it will be recreated if needed on the fly. Sorry if what I wrote gave that impression.

Sorry, here's the locations: ftp://download.intel.com/design/motherbd/mv/USB2.0_5.1.266.0_WinXP_EHCI.exe ftp://download.intel.com/design/motherbd/mv/USB2.0_5.1.266.0_WinXP_QFE.exe

You didn't mention it, but did you go to windowsupdate to see if it would update the driver in case you didn't have the latest one. Also, certain intel boards do require some updates, but best read about it from intel board first. Here are two listed: Download MS USB 2.0 Drivers for WinXP Download WinXP Update for USB 2.0

Where to begin? Do you need virtual memory if you have more than enough ram? Theoretically, no. In actuality, even if disabled, pagesys will be created. It is not only a physical file, it seems also to function as a variable that other programs call on to store info to preserve ram for a program's more compelling task. Is it a scratch pad? It seems that it can function that way apart from the amount of ram available. Letting Windows Manage or Doing it yourself? This used to be called Dynamic and Fixed virtual memory. In theory Windows Dynamically managed the file and it would grow or decrease in size depending on the way the computer functioned. Early on, this supposedly had the advantage of allowing windows to find the space that a contiguous file could be run from. Today, the dynamic file does not seem to need to be contiguous. Fixed allowed a user to limit the size of the file to be created. The problem was not one of speed but of space. While the dynamic pagefile was supposed to increase and decrease, often it only grew. In the days of smaller hard disks, this became a problem. Secondarily it was noted that a fixed pagefile, because it was a limited file size, seemed to be faster in some respects since the cache stored more recent "data" overwriting earlier data to preserve the fixed length of the cache. The dynamic cache often retained both newer and older "data" and so had to search more. Putting the pagefile on the outer track This was a trick introduced by Norton's speed disk. The outer track of a hard drive moves at a greater velocity. The theory is that read and write functions are faster. As far as the heads moving around, Davros, I am not sure that I agree. Heads being in the vecinity of data and it being near the cache would mean essentially nothing. The computer keeps track of data through a file allocation table, whose location can be no where near the "data". The heads would still have to move to get the file index to know where and what to do and how to modify a file, so head movement may be moot. Just to give an example, several years ago people noticed that Microsoft Office components loaded so much more quickly than others. It turned out that on their installation, Office components were loaded at a specific place on the platter in a contiguous fashion so that the controller did not have to query the file allocation table, it already had the specific zone to go to load the components. This works for loading Office programs; the time saved was a function of the controller not having to go first to the file index and being able to read the program contiguously. When you load something or write something, the heads have to consult the file index otherwise. Loading the pagefile to the outer track helps the speed of reads. But, what do I know? Loading the cache on another disk or partition I am not an engineer. Having more than one disk on a controller helps with volume. All disks are not read simultaneously and info in and out works much like a busy intersection. I've never seen any statistics that actually show a faster through put. I would say put the cache on the fastest hard disk, which, usually is the one you boot from and put most of your most used programs. Put your data elsewhere for space constraints. Fragmented caches Norton's Speeddisk used to "defrag" the cache. I am not sure that it does this under NTFS or that it puts the cache on the outer track. I believe clutch told me that W2K/XP cut the heart out of it and it doesn't anymore. There may be software that can defrag the cache. On the other hand, defragging the hard disk no matter what the pagefile is has seemed to me to do more for speed than most other things. I work with databases mainly and I defrag by last Access. For whatever reason, this speeds things along better than alphabetically or creation date or just space alotment. Microsoft gives a formula for using pagefile if you want to handle it yourself. Clutch seems to have a formula he uses that works for him. It may be trial and error is perhaps still the best way to tweak after you've read some folks about it. While this article is about 95 and 98 it is a long but interesting read: http://www.rojakpot.com/Speed_Demonz/Swapfile_Optimization/Swapfile_Optimization_01.htm

As far as I know the 23.11 drivers are the only one's that work most often with W2k/XP and OpenGL. The rest have to be "tweaked". Apparently, Microsoft DirectX controls the drivers. When W2K/XP shells out to OpenGL, DirectDraw, which retains control, has to be bypassed by a fix in the video drivers themselves. The second problem is that some OpenGL games are defaulted for 60Hz. So, these too have to be readjusted. Many solutions are given above (Powerstrip,RivaTuner,NvRefresh) that work for some and not for others. Try this http://www.3dcht4u.de/3dc/11gwe7/w2k-nvidia-refresh-rate-fix.zip it too has worked for some and not others. However with all these "tweaks" setting one thing one place means resetting in a variety of other places elsewhere.

It might be that it is not recognizing the regional code then. Look in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ System\ CurrentControlSet\ Control\ Class\ <CDROM GUID>\ <instance number>\ DefaultDVDRegion (binary) to see if the registry is set correctly.