Dr Nick

Hi Everybody!

I have a Maxtor 120gb drive and an Asus P4S800 mobo. I am running ME.

I have had both these components for a while and they have been working fine - but in different systems.

For reasons not worth going into here, I recently brought these two components together. If you have ever done this yourself you will know that the OS finds a whole bunch of new resources to install if you swap your HD to another mobo. And this is what happened here. Unfortunately the system hung so I decided to do a fresh install (having backed up everything as a contingency).

I completely removed the partitions and reinstalled them creating four 30 mb partitions (because ME doesnt like large partitions).

When I tried to install ME it didnt get much further than after scandisk before it said "Serious error writing to drive C" in a dos box and the system hung. I tried reformatting and various attempts at work arounds but always the same problem. I ran scandisk thoroughly on it from a diffrerent machine and the drive is fine.

The Mobo is fine too and works nicely with Linux using a different hard drive.

Being a smart *** I reinstall ME on another machine and then swapped it back to the Asus Mobo and it works now, but at boot I get a strange error warning me that there is something wrong with the registry. If I ignore and run scanreg it says all is well.

The system is now rock steady (much better than usual) but I still get the registry error report each time I boot.

Should I be worried?

Cheers!

bigsinky

get rid of ME it is the spawn of the devil. pure unadulterated keek of an operating system. do yourself a favour and downgrade to 98SE.

cheers

big sinky

hedgehog

Have you tried a BIOS update? Often solves disk related problems just like this.

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

Agreed. The only Windows OS worse than ME is 95. And maybe NT4. Either go backwards (98SE only), or forwards: I prefer 2k to XP, but I seem to be in a minority.

M

QuattroMNC

do you by any chance have a VGA card of geforce FX5600 Radeon 9600 or higher??

If you do try changing it's bus speed to 4x AGP I had this a couple of months back on the same board + drive, as soon as the card was changed everything worked.

PS don't ask me how or why coz i'm stumped

Dr Nick

Thanks for the video card tip - I do have a 9800 pro..... but hell will freeze over before I clock it back to 4x. That's not what I bought it for. The Bios Update option sounds good. This asus board has BIOS backup so there is now a little extra safety to a process which always struck me as a little risky in the past.

And for those knocking ME ... yes I do know everyone thinks its ****e. So do I. In fact I think all MS OSs are ****e. which is why I am on my last version of Windoze.

I'm running Linux now and there are some very good emulators coming to the fore which will allow me to run decent games on Linux. Once that's sorted, I won't be coming back, because there's nothing else I need Windoze for.

Cheers

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

1) There is no measurable performance loss in dropping to AGPx4. Or even to AGPx2. Dropping to AGP x1 would only lose you about 5% performance.

2) I wish you luck trying to get the ATI drivers working in Linux - nVidia drivers are way easier, and better written. ATI has terrible OGL coding and little Linux support. Even experts struggle to get their drivers woring...


M

Dr Nick

So for us muppets.... i.e. me....

Just what is the advantage of an 8x card over a 4x one? I had assumed it was that 8x was twice as fast.

Cheers

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

Nothing at all - it's just marketing hype. A bit like ATA133 drives, which are no faster in the real world than ATA100 ones.

You have to understand the history of the AGP port, which goes back to the days when gfx cards typically had about 8MB (or 16MB on top-of-the-range jobs) and RAM for gfx cards was insanely expensive. The idea of the AGP ort was to allow the GPU to use system RAM to process textures, and leave the gfx RAM to sort out drawing etc. You also need to remember than in those days (and even now) texture rendering was a massive resources hog, so the idea was that the AGP port needed to be as fast as possible to pass the textures back and forth. You also had to allocate a section of RAM specifically for rendering - which is what you are doing with AGP Aperture Size.

Now fast forward to today: even entry-level cards have 64MB and top cards have 256 or even 512MB. The gfx card is actually more powerful than the rest of the computer and simply doesn't need all that AGP port bandwidth. All it needs it what is used to send the final rendered pictures. The only exception to this rule is if you are silly enough to place a p*ss-poor card in a very fast rig, then turn the eye candy as high as it will go. But even then the performance loss between x4 and x8 will probably be about 2% - it will be a slide show in both cases anyway.


M