A few questions if I may

[JMD 0]

I'm running NT 4.0 SP 6A.

I have the ASUS P3BF Motherboard.

 

I was told that my USB port is not recognized by NT. Is this true?

 

I was also told that my AGP slot is not recognised by NT. Is this true?

 

If the answer is true to the questions above, is there a way to get NT to recognize them. I have an AGP video card and I would like to install a web cam in the future.

 

PART 2

 

Is it possable to install WIN 2000 on my system as a dual boot. If so can you give me an idea on how to go about doing this. Please keep in mind I have limited skills in this department.

 

Many thanks.

 

Regards

 

Joe

[DosFreak 2]

Quote:

I was told that my USB port is not recognized by NT. Is this true?

True.


I was also told that my AGP slot is not recognised by NT. Is this true?

True.

To dual-boot with Windows 2000 you would need a second partition.
It's likely that you only have one at the moment. If so you would have to backup your data and re-pairtition your drive.

[JMD 0]

Thanks Dos

 

I guess there isen't a software out there that would fool NT into recognising the USB AND AGP.

 

I understand that you can make NT think that it's Win 95. Would this solve the problem? and if this was done what effect would it have on NT as far as its memory managment abilities.

 

Thanks

[DosFreak 2]

1. NT 4 only has Directx 3.

2. Your NT4 video drivers only support DX3.

3. AGP isn't really implemented in NT4.

4. If your game requires a DX ver later than DX3 it won't work. You can hack in DX5&6 but there really isn't a point since almost no games work. Refer to Game Compatibility list on this site for info on your app/game.

5. No way to get USB working on NT4 unless you want to pay alot of $$$$ and I mean ALOT for the proggy. (If I had it I'd give it to ya but I don't.). If the manufacturer of your device made a specialized driver for it it could work but if they didn't then it won't.

6. To get AGP & USB your gonna have to install Windows 2000. Don't worry 2000 isn't that drastic of a change from NT4. It's basically NT4 with more compatibility and more ease of use. That's about it.

7. Start backing up now..... You don't need a dual-boot since 2000 supports almost everything that NT4 does. (Unless it was a highly specialized app like Defrag/AV or somesuch)

 

[BladeRunner 0]

Well, as somebody else said, but more information:

 

USB under NT4 - hardly ever seen.

It requires the manufacturer of the hardware device to write specific USB stacks for NT4, not an easy task.

I've seen a USB Epson scanner than works under WinNT and I also believe Iomega claim their external USB ZIP drive works under WinNT.

NT 4's lack of plug & play really plays havock with USB, that's the main reason MS didn't bother adding support for it - they'd have to make NT4 fully plug & play compatible - same reason Win95 doesn't work properly with USB.

 

AGP - Well, as long as you are using Service Pack 3 or above your AGP video card will be recognised.

Rather lackluster performance and really not worth it.

NT4 will probable report resource conflicts with your AGP card - don't worry about these, NT4 is accessing it as a PCI slot.

 

Dual-boot.

Very simple to setup.

I don't believe NTFS 4 & NTFS 5 are fully compatible with one another.

Suggestion:

Partition hard drive into 3:

C Drive - Boot partition - FAT16

D Drive - NT4 partition - NTFS4

E Drive - Win2k partition - NTFS5

 

Chuck WinNT4 on first.

Once that's up and running install Win2k onto the seperate partion, it will automatically setup you're dual-boot.

Win2k first would be problematic, WinNT doesn't know about Win2k and probably wont automatically setup a dual-boot.

[DosFreak 2]

Update NT4 to SP6a before installing Windows 2000.

 

IIRC, NTFS 5 support wasn't implemented in NT4 until SP4.

 

*If you don't install SP6a before 2k then you will be unable to use NT4.

[rgodart 0]

I have to agree with dosfreak. Only install win2k on your machine. I don't see the point of dual-booting 2 NT-based OSes.

[JMD 0]

Thanks guys.

 

I have NT installed already with SP 6A. What I hope to do is by another 7200 rpm hard drive before I install it. I only have about 1.7 gig left on my drive and I still have some large programs, not to metion games to install.

 

I will have a friend help me out. I'm a little nervous to say the least because I have been so very pleased with NT 4.0 i don't want to mess it up.

 

I personaly think NT 4.0 is the best software out there. It has been rock solid for me, and handels my Cad software perfictly. But it has it's limits that's where win 2000 will come in. Also just a little weary about win 2000 still.

 

Thanks again.

[JMD 0]

Normaly you have a point rgodart, but I have some software that wont run on 2000 yet. I would have prefered win 98 along with NT, but I hear its a big headache to install after NT. Infact I heard that you can't install it after NT. I'm using NTFS files.

 

Cheers

[BladeRunner 0]

Yup, if you want to dual-boot Win98 & WinNT it is a lot easier to install Win98 first, again WinNT does all the setting up for you.

Win98 needs to have a FAT16 or FAT32 partition to boot from, so if your totally NTFS it's not going to work.

However, you should not be considering junk like Win98.

Sure, dual-boot WinNT & Win2k if you have some software that requires WinNT and isn't yet stable under Win2k (Although it begs the question, why isn't it stable under an OS that is over a year old now?)

But please, don't down-grade your PC by installing Win9x/DOS.

[JMD 0]

Yes I agree BladeRunner I would rather stick to the NT platform myself.

 

The software that is not Win 2000 compatable yet is Ideas Cad software.

[JMD 0]

I was just given information that NT does recognize AGP. AGP was implamented after SP 3.

 

This is the site.

 

 

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q174/5/67.ASP

 

 

Cheers

[Uykucu 0]

Hi,

First of all I have not managed to get the usb port on a single bloody NT4 machine to work despite all those patches and claims. so just forget about it It doesn't work.

 

Coming to your AGP port. You are seein an image on your screen don't you? Then it works AGP is actually just a bus structure and it is controlled by the bios (in lamen terms) it does not matter what OS you use your cards will always work because they are using another OS, your bios namely

 

Coming to your win2k dual boot I have only one qouestion;

WHY?

If you have the win2k just install it, scrap NT4 and get it over with. Everything that worked under NT will work under 2k since windows 2000 is actually Windows NT 5. Also your USB port and half a dozen other devices that are not supported under windows NT including your future webcam will work just fine.

 

I hope it helped.

 

PS. I also suggest upgrading all your Hard disks to NTFS 5

[JMD 0]

Uykucu Thanks for the info. But I don't have Win 2000 and im not sure that I would want to have all of the problems that come along with win 2000. I haven't heard to many great things about it, expecially the latest survice pack, also there are a lot of companies the still have problems writing drivers for it, so I think I will sit back for a while until they get there act together...

Cheers

[Uykucu 0]

Hi again JMD.

But Quite frankly i disagree with you there are no driver problems whatsoever on w2k the reason being for most of the devices you don't even need drivers w2k comes with it. And let me now all those messages you see on these forums are caused buy people who overclock, does not know how to build a computer such.

I am an Independent IT consultant working in london and I recommended it to all my customers and all of them are verry happy with but you have to have at least 256MB of RAM for it to work with any decency. It is stable, you don't get blue screen fatal exceptions, you don't get GPF's. If a program crashes you can just terminate it and continue working just like in NT4.

Coming to the SErvice Packs.

Well We have received SP2 from MS about a week in advance and teste4d it for 2 weeks on our own network, www and DNS servers before deploying to anybody. Quite frankly the only problem we had was one of the Dell DNS servers froze while rebooting and we had to go down to the building and reset it. which it worked just fine afterwards. (Although it might have been the IIS5 patch as well I dunno!)

I hope this helps as well

 

PS. If you wanna avoid problems steer clear from winXP

[clutch 1]

Some companies are having problems writing drivers for SP2? What companies and what drivers are you talking about? Where are you getting this information? The only issue that I have had has been flaky ODBC connectivity with 2 of our applications when used by non-admins. It seems like a registry permissions issue, and is usually corrected if I log in and run most of the application functions the first time myself to get all the keys written and updated.

 

I know that you don't care for Win2K for whatever reasons you may have, but you seem to be "defending" NT4 against whatever evils Win2K seems to pose. Give some clear examples as to the issues you have seen so we can determine the root cause.

[JMD 0]

Clutch it was a general comment made by the information givin on this board about service pack 2 problems and driver problem with certain vidio cards and so on. I will wait until thoes issues are delt with before I change to 2000. I will be changing in the near future but as I understand it there are problems with the latest updates.

 

I must addmit that Win 2000 is becoming more attractive as an OS I have heard good thing about it, but I figure I will wait a little longer before the change.

 

Kind Regards

 

Joe

 

[Uykucu 0]

Hey clutch for this problem if it really pisses you off. contact microsoft and ask for the new ODBC drivers. That sorts it out...

[Intlharvester 0]

I wonder if the ODBC problem is related to the "Lotus Notes" problem in NT4 SP6 (which also killed some ODBC drivers for non-admins).