Mua_Dib

I'm having drama's with a Promise Fastrak100 "lite" controller (A7V333) and 2 x 40gig Seagate Barracuda IV's. XP wont install. Tried all the obvious fixes;- New cables, F6 then driver disk, changed CD-ROM's, updated BIOS'es blah blah etc etc etc...... Gonna try 2 IBM's..... -Mua

I've noticed slight improvements since the days of UDMA33 drives. But the increased performance is negligable since the previous incarnation. The ATA design seems to be getting old and tired and arent moving in larger steps inline with what other hardware manufacturers are doing. For example; Processor giants arent increasing the speeds of their flagship chips by 33mhz increments anymore. Adaptec have also stopped increasing their interface bandwidth by 20/40 mhz upgrades and are now doubling in each new design. As soon as i get some dosh together i'm moving to SCSI160/320 with a Seagate Cheeta 15k drive. -Mua

Fair enough. But page files can get quite large and vary in size (if you let windows change its size for you). This of course does depend on how much ram you have to start with. I have 128 meg of ram and my page file is currently 260meg (i was just playing emperor battle for dune ). There really is only 2 ways to get the most out of a page file. 1. Dont have one at all. spend up big on ram. 2. Place the Page file on a seperate smaller disk on its own (if IDE, not on the same interface as the OS Disk) or place it at the beginning of your disk in its own partition. -Mua

Yeah. I havent been paying to much attention to the prod activation thingy. Theres 2 ways of looking at the issue. 1. I'm sure you could imagine how much money MS has lost due to people copying OS's. Its the same ol same ol about software companies loosing income because of piracy. Of all the software that does get copied OS's surely must be the most pirated. So from this point of view i think its fair enough that they put copy protection in. 2. MS is so huge and makes so much money anyway, how is a few 100's of thousands of extra copies that are made and or cracked going to put them in the financial hurt locker. From this perspective i go and start to warm up my burning tower! (not really, but some would) So i spare little thought to it mainly because one day when Win2K is long dead, XP is on its way out and been outdated by 3 newer MS OS's, Prod Activation becomes the norm, we will have very little choice anyway. -Mua

Yeah. Drivers are fun huh? Thats why i dont jump on the band wagon to soon when a new OS comes out. I will wait and watch quietly for a little while b4 i snap-up XP Pro. I will wait for SP3/SP4 first b4 going to XP. But i dont think MS will stop support. I think perhaps that the support will be paralell between the 2K/XP Pro. Either way i think the future looks bright for all the current NT based OS's. -Mua

Creating a RAMdrive to put the page file in defeats the purpose of having it in the first place. The page file is there for when you run out of physical memory and when your task swapping. For example, if EddiE created a half gig ram drive he would then have to have a page file because he effectively would then have only 256 meg of ram. But whats the point of that? (unless of course you were doing something other than the norm with your OS/Apps) -Mua

AndyF is right Dusz. I've never even heard of anyone using a RAMDISK in that manner these days. Back in the MS-DOS days, if you were lucky enough to have large amounts of ram you could use a ram disk for time-critical and resource intensive apps. The only other time i see it now days is when a boot disk creates one to load in tools to be used such as a virus scanning or hard drive partitioning/creation tools. -Mua

So long as you got it from the ASUS website (which is strange because it says the latest update is 1005. Goto http://www.asus.com.tw/products/motherboard/bios.html for more information) just use it as is on a boot disk with Aflash.exe and the new BIOS file. Remember: backup a copy of your current BIOS file. I run a p3v4x as well. -Mua

Thymios, XP is completely unrelated to 98/ME architecture. XP is based on the NT Kernel with many improvements. Its more accurate to say this is a more improved version of Win2K/NT4. Also XP will come in 2 version. XP Home (aimed at home users as you mentioned) and XP Professional (Win2k pro's replacement/alternative) As for Win2K Pro's future, who knows? It is unlikely that a new OS released 2 years after another is going to be missing some of the features introduced in the earlier incarnation. That would be a step back. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/default.asp http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/default.asp These Links should help. -Mua

Like i said earlier, XP will do better in terms of Application Compatibility. This may not be of any benefit to those that run 2K already without any problems. When XP does come along, i'll be getting it. Mainly because my migration from nt4 workstation to 2K pro did not go as smoothly as i liked mainly because on app problems. My 2K servers have got a fair few SI packages just waiting to be served to XP boxes that wont run well or at all on 2K machines. As soon as thats in place i spose i'll change over to the Server 2002 family Gotta stay employed somehow -Mua

I do agree that XP's timing seems strange and it will be interesting to see if they continue to do SP's for both Win2k and XP. Or maybe starting with SP3 or maybe SP4 there will be relevant updates included for both OS's. After all they have virtually the same kernel. At least Mico$oft is giving us more of a choice now -Mua

I think one of the 'great things' that XP will improve over w2k on is application compatibility....so the beta testers tell me anyway. This will be of use to me and other network administrators who suffered a little going to Win2k from NT4 on a network with hundreds of different kinds of apps to support. On a home note though i have experienced some difficulties with older apps on W2k and apparently XP is going to resolve some of those issues. BUT! If SP3 is a huge improvent i may be at the back of the queue with ya! -Mua (and dont even start me on WinPatchMe!)

W2K Drivers will work on XP. For me however W2K has been great but its just a stepping stone to XP. Microsoft has dealt with most issues that have stopped W2K from being the messiah of OS's so XP should be good (and from what i've heard from the Beta testers i work with its going to be grand). I'm expexting great things from XP and I've never been afraid of trying new things (cept this one time.....Win95) he he he. I'm just glad they have dumped the 16bit stuff. -Mua

I think you should call your ISP and see if any of their other Win2K users are experiencing any problems. Aside from that you may need to just re-run your win2k cd installation again. Dont worry bout it either, i did it the other day and it corrected some niggling problems i was having. -Mua

Is the service failing at any time? Have you tried going to the recovery tab on the service properties and setting the first/second/subsequent failure boxes to 'restart service' -Mua