Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Computer Learning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mr.mark who wrote (12343)	10/7/2000 2:21:37 PM
From: jw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110604

the only experience i have with win2k is looking at the outside of the sealed carton sitting four feet away from my computer. mr.mark, a few reasons to/not to load Win2k. Sure doesn't sound like fun<g> Regards, /jw From: Michael A. McKenney Electrical Engineer, CNE-IW & NW5, MCP A+ Certified For those who are thinking about Win2K, I thought I would let you know what I think about it. Tyan Tiger 133A, Dual PIII 550 MHz processors, 448 MB RAM, Dual Seagate SCSI-UWHard Drives, One swap partition on each hard drive. I choose the Server Ed over Professional for fault tolerance. Professional does not have mirroring and RAID support. It has been a while since I installed Win2K Server Ed. on my workstation. My overall opinion is mixed. Installation: It took about 6 hours to get all the hardware installed and tweaked. The USB and SCSI devices had no problems being found. Even the Epson Color Stylus on the Belkin USB-Parallel cable. The computer is dual boot with Win98SE also. The lack of the 64 KB resource buffers that haunted Win9x makes Win2K awesome to run. My only suggestions to new users are: 1.) Use NTFS for the Win2K Primary partition 2.) Separate Win2K swap partitions. You can have many of them.Win9x limited you to one. 3.) 256 MB or more RAM. Win2K loves RAM over CPU for performance Make sure you have a full day to spend with it. Plan you partitions if dual booting. Changes I had to make to support Win2K: I needed to replace my SCSI scanner with a USB scanner with Win2K drivers. Microsoft Excel 97 has some VB issues that I have not resolved as of yet. These will be resolved most likely by upgrading to Excel 2000. I will replace most of my non-Win2K software over the next year. I usually do this when it is needed. I did get Symantec's System Works. Most of the tools do not support the Server Ed. However, for Win2K Professional users you will want to get it. Norton Antivirus does load and work. Most of my games do work, however I do have some problems. I may download the DX8 beta and try it. I did apply Win2K SP1. It was not fun over a dialup 56K modem. It worked great without any problems. It is worth applying. All of my hardware does work fine no glitches. The backup software in Win2K sees my tape backup unit. I was able to backup FAT32 and NTFS partitions. It is a little slower than Win98SE. My backup speed was 55 MB/min instead of 60 MB/min. I have not tried DirectCD on my HP SCSI-2 CD-RW yet. I few users have wrote me that it does work. I do not burn many CDs. My internet software does not work with the dialer. I received the Win2K instructions for Mindspring on configuring the dialer and the internet works fine. With dual processors downloads process faster. Win2K does use both processors to share the load. Problems and reasons that I still dual boot: The Sound Blaster Live! Liveware 3 does not support AC-3 in Win2K. This stops Dolby Digital 5.1 from my Sound Blaster Live, DVD-ROM and PowerDVD. You can watch movies in Direct Sound only. No date on AC-3 support from Creative Labs. Quake 3 Arena is about 20% slower. I get better performance with a single processor over SMP. Q3A is faster in Win98SE. 3D Mark 2000's results on-line viewer does not work in Win2K. Paul at Madonion is looking into this. Games play better in in98SE. The Nvidia drivers do not perform as well in Win2K as in Win98SE. Why I run it: My hardware is mainly SCSI and USB. I only have an ATAPI DVD-ROM. The dual processors and 448 MB of RAM werepurchased for Win2K. I am working on my MCSE, MCDBA and other certifications. I cannot wait for full support from hardware and software vendors. I designed the computer to fully support NT. Win2K required some minor changes. Reasons to add or switch Win2K: 1.) No 64 KB resource limit. No more running out of resources. 2.) Memory usage is vastly improved 3.) SMP support: You will see some improvement with Win2K using both processors. You will still need applications to make full use of SMP. 4.) Good USB support 5.) Stability and reliability: It is more stable than Win2K Reasons not to add or switch Win2K 1.) Hardware does not fully support Win2K. You will need a good processor and loads of RAM. You will want more than 256 MB to get decent benefits from Win2K 2.) Gaming: You will see a drop in gaming performance. This is not designed for gaming. 3.) Upgrading hardware and software to Win2K versions. You will not want to run older ISA hardware on Win2K. You will want the latest versions of programs to full support Win2K. You will have to upgrade all 16-bit applications or you will spend time configuring the memory spaces. Very costly. 4.) Lack of total support by vendors: Since Win2K is not designed or touted for gaming, you will be hard pressed for decent support. Creative Labs AC-3 support. 5.) Planning the installation: It can be very tricky setting it up in a dual boot environment. It took me 5 attempts to get the partitions to remain the same for both Win98SE and Win2K. 6.) Novice user of Win9x. If you are a novice do not upgrade. This is not your Grandma's operating system. No DOS level to fall back to. When it crashes, you reinstall or restore. It even gives me problems and I am an expert in Microsoft and Novell products. It can be a very difficult OS to troubleshoot. It is designed for high end hardware. In conclusion, Win2K is a great improvement over Win9x. Win9x does support all things the user needs. In 3-5 years, Win2K will replace Win9x as the baseline OS. This is due to the advancements in hardware and software. As processors get faster and RAM gets cheaper you will be able to take full use of Win2K. I would not switch just to do it. You may be sorry. Michael A. McKenney Electrical Engineer, CNE-IW & NW5, MCP A+ Certified mckennma@ix.netcom.com