teqguy

You guys are still disregarding the fact that the drive is already active! PnP automatically initializes hardware and makes it ready for use upon installation. His hard drive is already mounted and available. If it wasn't it would still appear in My Computer as an unpartitioned, unformatted drive... unless appropriate Policies were set or a registry entry was missing. The drive just needs to be reinstalled via Device Manager to repair a missing registry entry.

IMO WMP10 is slightly more robust than 9, although I don't appreciate all of the advertisements ridden on the main window. It has never crashed on me, even when playing 1GB+ videos. The interface goes further to hide some of the great features WMP has to offer, such as SRS WoW, which was introduced in Windows Media Player 8, but never broadly mentioned by Microsoft. For those of you who have yet to experience what SRS has to offer, go to www.srslabs.com/Demonstrations.asp.

He already posted the specs, but my post somehow overwrote it. I believe he had an 850mhz PIII with 128mb of ram. Pr-man... there are more solutions to consider than just 2k/XP, as I demonstrated with my post. Unless you have a specific application in mind that only runs on Windows, I suggest taking a look at Linux. Unlike Windows, you don't have to install the OS to get the taste of it, because there are LiveCDs available. Check out Knoppix.

That board only supports 1.5v AGP cards (AGP 3.0 rev)... meaning it isn't backwards compatable with AGP 2x/4x. If your 9800 doesn't support AGP 8x, then your AGP slot is supplying 1.8v less than it needs to be to power the card. The same applies to a 7500. In some circumstances, undervoltage is just as volatile as doubling an overvoltage, so it is possible that you damaged your motherboard. ::hugs P4 motherboard's seperate AGP rail:: Was that 7500 an AGP or PCI board? Because if you haven't tried a PCI video card, I'd shoot for that before anything else.

I know that... but hypothetically had they had jumpers, I doubt that they wouldn't recieve any attention. Look guys: Quote: The HD is recognized in my hardware profile, and without error, but in MyComputer, it only gives the primary HD. Both of you are straying off track. His only problem is that the icon for the drive isn't appearing in Windows Explorer. The only solution for this is to reinstall the drive, because I have yet to find a registry key fix like the one for CD/DVD drives.

I'd assume he has the competence to set the jumpers properly, but maybe he'll prove me wrong.

Have you checked out Linux as an alternative? Although Windows is the best solution for ensuring compatability, Linux is more robust in both performance and stability. There are distributions available that offer native compatability with Windows compiled applications, such as SuSe, and for other distributions you can install Wine and run Windows applications on top of the Linux kernel. For every retail Windows based application, there are at least two freeware or Gnu-licensed applications that perform on par with it's Windows counterpart. A good example of this is Open Office, which entirely replaces Microsoft Office for free. Gaming on Linux, however, is a complicated matter. Either you have games that natively and soley render in DirectX(like most Microsoft games do) or they are compiled to be specifically run under Windows. While a lot of games, such as IdSoft's entire line of games, have Linux ports, most games primarily use DirectX as the default renderer. You shouldn't have a problem if you're playing any Valve games that use the HalfLife engine, any IDsoft games, or any of the Unreal series. If all else fails, wrap it. http://www.v3x.net/directx/

Perfect example of why prebuilt systems are limiting... if Compaq was actually dumb enough to store something as volatile as the BIOS on the hard drive, I really have to ask what are they smoking and where can I get some. I can help you clear up the inconsistancies of the BIOS by flashing it with the motherboard manufacturer's BIOS... unless of course it's an un-marked prebuilt board(which I doubt). If the latter is the problem, I can modify the BIOS and manually reveal features that were hidden by Compaq. Since we don't have to avoid voiding your warranty, poke around inside the case and see if you can't find a model number, brand name, or anything else that would be distinguishable. If you can't find anything like that, try taking a picture of it and I'll try to identify it by sight. As for incompatabilities with the chipset and graphics card, I wasn't around for your first post... so I don't know which card you're dealing with. The multiplier of the AGP clock and the voltage of the AGP slot are negligible, seeing as how a 2x slot is structurally different from a 4x and/or 8x slot. If the card has an adjustable multiplier and voltage, it tends to have two notches in the PCB connector(the gold contacts), the first notch being for 2x support and the second being for 4x. If your motherboard's AGP slot has a small section of contacts, then a notch, then a large section of contacts it's an AGP 2x slot. The AGP 4x/8x slot mirrors the 2x slot, with a large portion, a notch, and then a small portion. With the Radeon installed, download and install Via's chipset drivers available here: http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=403 These drivers not only improve compatability, but also performance and stability in the IDE controllers, onboard sound, onboard video, and chipset... because Via rolls everything into one neat package. After we get this taken care of, you might want to grab the Forceware 66.00 drivers to ensure the best performance and compatability with your card.

You guys are straying off topic... The technical explanation for System Idle Process is that it IS using 99% to 100% of the CPU quanta, but it's not doing what you think. Instead of acting like a normal application or service and making use of the CPU's co-processor or any mathematical fundamentals of the processor, it only does one thing: HALT, HALT, HALT, HALT, HALT... well you get the idea. The halt command is known by all processor architectures and is included in the primary instruction set. It functions as a method of making the processor less than idle, stopped entirely... but still active and available. As soon as it's issued a command other than HALT, it becomes functional. Halting the processor reduces temperatures significantly, extending the life and stability of the processor where it's needed most- servers. Desktop users might benefit from better overclocking when comparable to a 95/98/Me/NT4/NT5 system, but other than that it's just 20Kb of ram you will never miss. The same principles can be found in software such as Waterfall and CPUIdle, but it seems Microsoft never leaves a stone unturned to integrating and thereby nullifying third party utilities.

The only dependant factor on how many drives you can run simultaneously is the motherboard/controller card, despite whether they're IDE, SCSI, or SATA. A typical desktop board supports 2 drives per IDE channel. With the introduction of SATA, most SATA host controllers can support up to about 16 devices per channel... but because one of the primary goals of SATA was to reduce latency between the hard drive and other components, only one device per channel is allocated. Windows 2k and higher support as many drives as available. As for fixing your problem, try going to Device Manager (Control Panel >> Performance and Maintenance >> System >> Hardware >> Device Manager... or a quicker way is the Windows Logo Key + Pause/Break >> Hardware >> Device Manager). In device manager, expand the tree that says "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers". Right click the Primary IDE Channel and click Uninstall. Do the same for the Secondary and [Your Host Controller Name Here] IDE Controller. Then go up to "Disk Drives" and uninstall the hard drive in question. This should make both drives appear in My Computer... but not only that, it'll guarantee the fastest DMA mode available for your hard drives is enabled, which will improve performance significantly.