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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mr.mark who wrote (11426)	11/5/2000 1:39:47 PM
From: Moving Sphere	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14778

mr. mark, I guess your comment has inspired me to share some more... I've learned quite a few things during my "uphill climbing" effort and I like to share some of those hard-earned lessons so some of you out there don't have to go thru the frustration that I went thru. First off, below is my 2 cents "limited" experience only and is not based on expert knowledge. Please don't take the below as advice or recommendation for I'm definitely not qualified to give any. 1) After buying a new harddrive (I bought a Maxtor 20 gig for only $125.00. Not bad when you considered that it cost over $400.00 for a 200 megabyte harddrive about some + years ago), I backed up my whole "original" harddrive to the brand new harddrive. I copied everything! Including hidden systems files. 3) After making a clean copy of my original drive, I took the original drive out of my computer. And I made my brand new drive my "C:" bootable drive. This way, if all else failed, I could always plug my old drive back and run it like my nightmare never happened. :-) Btw, after making my new drive into a "C:" drive, I found out I had to do a "system c:" from my Windows 98 boot disk (after making it an active drive using Fdisk) to make it bootable again. I also found out that I could just let the system boot from my CD-ROM that has the Windows 2000 CD in it. 4) Because Win2K is so picky about the hardwares, I took away all the cards in my computer and started only with the primary graphic card (Matrox G400 Max dualhead). This way, I could find out which card give me problem when I added them back later after a successful installation of Win2K. Btw, I downloaded all the Win2K drivers for all the cards and devices before even attempting the OS upgrade. 5) For those who are using AOL 5.0 to log into the internet, there are a few more thing you need to be aware of. This was one area that really frustrated me because I couldn't go into the internet with ease after my successful installation of the new OS. First, I found out that the existing AOL software running on Windows 98 is not 100% compatible with Win2K. So I went to "Windows 2000" under keyword in AOL to get the compatible version. Unfortunately, even after the successful installation of Win2K, the AOL 5.0 still could work well. It took me many, many times of redialing before AOL even acknowledged my modem connection. I could hear the modem sound making connection, I could see "connected" with a baud rate, but AOL just simply refused to respond! Despite my frustration, I remembered reading somewhere that in order for AOL to work w/Windows NT, I needed to download the Service Pack from Microsoft. But I got a dilemma, how do I get to the internet to download the Service Pack if I can't even log onto the internet using my AOL? What a nightmare! Then I remembered someone mentioned about netzero (a free internet access w/advertising windows) awhile ago. To make a long story short, I got hold of the netzero program after finding that it is Win2K compatible and installed it into my Win2K system. From there, I used Netzero to download the Service Pack for Win2K from Microsoft.com. Lo and Behold! After downloading the Service Pack and installed it, my AOL log-in becomes a very normal event- once connected, AOL responded, I'm in! Btw, the beauty of this huge Service Pack download (about 1 hour using modem) is that even when I lost modem connection during download, I could just click on the "retry" button on the Service Pack download AFTER I re-established my internet connection. After clicking on retry, the Service Pack download continued from where it left off. You don't know how relief I was when I saw that. I thought I've to download the whole thing all over again after waiting for more than 30 minutes on the first attempt! There you have it. I guess I'm sharing today because I thought I won a "victory" battle getting back my AOL to work with Win2K. As you know, everyone like to tell their victory story.... guess I'm no exception... :-) Best wishes to all!