>
> 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.
I was referring *specifically* to the combination of Athlon/x
motherboard/W2K.
>
> If someone has to continually reinstall their OS then they are
> overlooking
> some fundamental incompatibility such as the m/b itself,
PRECISELY MY POINT - dear oh dear, some Athlon chipsets (KT133A, say) don't
get on with W2K.
> 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.
This friend killed his system trying to install SP2. He wiped it clean and
went back to SP1.
>
> 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)
NT4 is roughly as bad for playing games as W2K. If you play games you're
considered a masochist if you use NT/W2K. Simple things like graphics cards
and sound cards are not supported sufficiently well under the big OSs. Many
games explicitly state that W2K is not supported.
>
>
> > > 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 get this problem even when NS hasn't been started on my system.
Re-starting PS clears the RAM completely.
>
> >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.
By the time you've factored in the cost of 2 CPUs and the motherboard to
support them, you've added 40-50% to your costs, and MP doesn't give you a
50% performance boost over the single processor system. It's around 30% as
far as I can tell. If you absolutely must have the best performance
available now, then yeah, get the dual CPU.
> Conventional RAM is dirt cheap but it's a serious
> bottleneck when compared to DDR
DDR gives a performance boost of 5-10%. But DDR is worth buying because it
is 5% extra performance for 2-3% extra cost.
> 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.
LOL. The P4 is a pile of crap. In a year's time it'll prolly be worth
considering. AMD's roadmap seems to show it falling significantly behind
Intel next summer, I reckon.
Jawed
