At 21:24 01-08-01 +0100, Jawed Ashraf wrote:
>The Athlon/RAM combination is very good value at the moment (actually that
>combination is silly money). If you buy as a complete system you should
>have no trouble - though it is fair to say that W2K and some varieties of
>Athlon motherboard do not get on. I personally wouldn't use W2K, as it is
>the most incompatible operating system MS has produced in years. I have one
>friend with it who reports all kinds of grief with software, drivers,
>hardware - he has re-installed operating system at least 5 times - he's not
>incompetent, he's just dealing with poorly written software and "unlucky"
>combinations.
Then I must be dealing with only 'lucky' combinations on my Win2K system
because the four USB devices (Wacom tablet, Garmin GPS programmer, cordless
mouse, and USB2IDE thingamajig), two firewire devices (Nikon LS-4000 and
Canon DV camera), Pinnacle video capture board, Epson SCSI scanner, Promise
ATA100 controller, DVD-RAM, SCSI tape, etc etc. all worked immediately and
smoothly as soon as they were installed. No conflicts, no reinstalls, no
BSOD's. The system is a dual-933 MHz Dell workstation with an i840 chipset
and 768 MB PC800 RDRAM.
If someone has to continually reinstall their OS then they are overlooking
some fundamental incompatibility such as the m/b itself, the system BIOS or
intermittent problems with a hard disk. It's also possible that they're
running an upatched system without the latest Service Packs and the like.
By the time that Microsoft gets an OS to be totally smooth they make it
obsolete, for example, NT 4.0 or Windows 98SE.
I have local copies of the text versions of the Windows Hardware
Compatibility Lists. If you go by their size which closely correlates to
the number of compatible devices that they list the order of *decreasing*
compatibility and hardware support is as follows:
NT 4.0 = 5.4 MB list (best)
Win98 = 4.6 MB list
Win 2000 = 3.4 MB list
Win Me = 1.9 MB list (worst)
> > so a
> > lot of fast RAM is important. Can anyone see any problems with this spec.
>
>No, 512MB would be my recommendation. Unfortunately Photoshop has some
>kind of bug in it that means you have to re-start it every few hours of
>editing as it doesn't seem to want to free-up all memory when an image is
>closed. (Version 6.0.1)
Use a Memory manager such as the one from AnalogX or MemTurbo. NikonScan
3.1 causes Photoshop to quit unexpectedly now and then but otherwise I've
never seen the memory problem that you mentioned.
>I've seen tests that show Photoshop improves quite nicely with dual
>processors Unfortunately, the same test shows you are far better off buying
>a 30%-faster single processor PC! It will cost less and work better.
If I were buying today I'd go for a dual Athlon m/b with DDR RAM as the
most bang for the buck. Conventional RAM is dirt cheap but it's a serious
bottleneck when compared to DDR or RDRAM. The latter, however, is greatly
overpriced. In my opinion the worst combination would be a new P4 machine
at any speed with SDRAM. That would be like putting the engine of an old VW
bug in a new Lamborghini.
Cary Enoch Reinstein aka Enoch's Vision, Inc., Peach County, Georgia
, http://www.bahaivision.com/ -- "Behind all
these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things.
The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object."
~Joseph Campbell
