[DeadCats]

Howdy, folks, long time no type!

Wife & I moved to Alaska and still setting stuff up...everything here is more difficult & takes longer than Down South.

Anyway, I'm going to be trying to help a buddy get Win2K installed on some older Gateway Pentium 200Mhz-cpu machines this weekend, and need some help. I don't have any more specifics about the machines except they've got onboard video cards and I would guess onboard sound, too.

I've searched the boards on "gateway" and found nothing, and am begging(!) for help. They've got a bunch of these machines in his department, but he has nothing but troubles with his testbed machine on the install.

I don't have any of the specifics, other than the failure occurs during installation, and I'm guessing it's hardware related. According to him, he's disabled onboard video, and replaced it with a variety of cards, but still no luck. And video may not be why the install fails, either.

I won't find out anything more specific until Sunday morning, but wanted to know if any of youse guys have run into anything problematic hardware-wise with older Gateway computers. I'm guessing these are all basic workstation machines, since they're owned by the State of Alaska.

Thanks for any replies, and good to see ya'll.

[AndyFair]

Win2k on Pentium-1 200MHz... 8)
erm...good luck!

Seriously, what's the memory like? Also, you say your friend has disabled the onboard graphics - has he also disabled the sound too?

Have you looked on Gateways website for help (OK, I know, silly question - you might as well go and ask a sheep for help)

Other than that, I can't offer any help - I'm still in a state of shock that anybody would try to run Win2k on a machine that old

Please, let us know if you get them working, also let us know what they run like :p


AndyF

[Intlharvester]

OK, I just want to point out that I ran W2K on a Pentium 133, and it was in fact slightly more responsive than NT4.0 w/Active Desktop on the same system. The system has 112MB RAM, SCSI, all PCI/EISA, and a decent graphics board (Matrox Mistique). I believe the machine was originally sold as a very expensive 'workstation'.

Admittedly the average Pentium system has a very slow PIO IDE drive (which NT hates!), limited memory that's difficult or impossible to upgrade, and a crappy Mach64 or whatever video chip.

[DeadCats]

It's not that a Pentium 200 (non-MMX) won't benefit from 2K. Give them enough RAM, which is what 2K dearly loves, and they should work fine. Gawd knows, it extended the life of my old P2 333Mhz which is what I still use.

It's a hardware problem, and unfortunately, I don't have even a clue as to why the install fails. Sunday, after trying it myself, I might know a bit more.

But please keep up the thread. Every bit may help.

Thanks,
DC

[Brian Frank]

I just have a question: Why the hell would you run Win2k on a P200?
Sure enough ram can make that thing run decently, but still...seems like a waste of time to me.
Of course I like to be fast...

[DeadCats]

Easy answer, sorry, they're all owned and used by the State of Alaska. Guess I forgot to mention my buddy's a SysAdmin in one of the branches, and he's in the preparation stage of deploying Win2K department-wide. He's in the process of loading it onto his testbed machines, and that's where the problem is occurring, but so far just on those specific Gateway machines.

I'll know more later this morning, when I get to take a look at a few of them...hopefully.

DC

P.S. Has anyone 'seen' DosFreak around lately?

[clutch]

Ummm, did you get any BIOS updates for them? I still have a few Gateway beaters at work (one 200MHz non-MMX and one 133MHz) that I run NT 4 SP6a on. Those, however, have separate video cards rather than on-board video. Also, memory hasn't been an issue until I tried to add more to the 133 units (I had 3 others that I threw away). They didn't care for newer DIMMs at all (yes, a couple of them took DIMMs). I had the same issue with some of our older Dell Dimension machines not being able to use current DIMMs, then I updated the BIOS on them and all's well.

[emthompson]

I had the same problem with my gateway 500. It would always screw up during the install. I called gateway to see what kind of board I had and to ask if it was compatible with Win2k. They told me that everything should work and that my bios version was Win2k compatible. Well after days of yelling and screaming, I decided to flash the newest Bios that gateway had. Well wouldn't you know it, worked like a charm. I hope that helps you in anyway. Please report back as to what you find.

[DosFreak]

1. 2k will run fine on those "old" computers. So no one give him any grief about it.
2. I am assuming that all of thesre machines are the same? When these problems occur and you have tried everything else that you can think of and can think of nothing else then try this: Strip down the system tottally except: CD,HD,Video,floppy. Remove ALL PCI devices and reset the bios to bios defaults. Triplecheck all cable arrangements and jumper settings.

[DeadCats]

Whelp, the problem's been resolved. Bad motherboard, that was all. They tried loading Win2K onto another Gateway, same (make/model) and it installed like a champ. But, try to install Win2K, Win98, Me, on the original problem-child, and they always failed.

At that point they figured out it was probably the motherboard, and started stripping it down, just like DosFreak suggested, and were able to verify that as the cause.

And the fact that Gateway had defined this as an actual 'incident' (and you can imagine what kind of support a State legislative branch IT dept. gets), should probably have suggested to us that it might be a specific-machine problem, since Gateway had no doubt sold bunches of these to corporate/State IT's and this was a first incident.

My buddy is especially glad, because now he doesn't have to go back to the legislature to get more money for hardware upgrades, since they have 200 of these same machines, just in his department alone. ('Course, they did give him the bucks for 250 fully-loaded Compaq iPaqs which the idiots think will actually be used for work...yeah, right).

But all's well that end's well, and thanks to everyone's input, especially DosFreak (good to see ya again).

[Brian Frank]

Those internet appliances are such a waste! You can get some cheap Emachines which have more features and wouldn't cost that much.
Man, I hate to think how much the government blows on items that aren't worth the money...of course, it's even worse when they lose them.
iPaq...your right, no one's going to use that for work. I personally don't see that category of pseudo-pc's as anything useful for the price.