E-66

That's absurd. He never mentioned what his father uses the PC for. If he's not gaming he can EASILY get by with a sub $50 AGP card. Hell, the 9800 was overkill if he wasn't using the PC for gaming.

Does this guy know his stuff or what? Thanks for the info, Jaclaz, MUCH appreciated! I've had Grub4Dos bookmarked for a while now but just haven't read up on it yet. I'll definitely check out the 911 forums and see what kind of ideas people have come up with that I can use myself. Another question: with an install done as outlined above, would it be possible to have the computer boot into XP in the normal fashion upon startup without seeing the boot menu, but if I wanted to see the boot menu I could initiate it using a hotkey when the PC starts?

Yeah, you are. Go to Wikipedia and type in your terms and you'll get a decent primer on what's what. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

If an XP install is done as I described above (with a hard drive formatted as a small primary partition and one or more logicals, and the boot files put on the primary partition and the OS on a logical), can a boot manager be 'added' to that configuration at a later time, or does the bootmanager need to be installed at the beginning of the process? I'm running XP by itself and plan on keeping it that way, but I was thinking that I could use a boot manager for giving me the option to boot into XP or use one or more DOS-based utilities like Ghost, whose executables I would locate on C:.

Format your disk with a small primary partition (under 1 GB). Then create an extended partition with as few or as many logical partitions as you'd like. Then when you install XP it'll install the OS on a logical partition but the boot files will be installed in the primary active partition, C:, as Sonic mentioned in post #6.

Perhaps the answer to your question is 'no' then.

Sure you could have. If you would have been more clear you would have had your answer by now. The subject line of your post was vague and didn't adhere to the posting guidelines of this forum. Since you asked about recent Programs, the answer you got from nitroshift was correct. I'm still not 100% sure what you want to do... maybe recent Documents? That's easily removed like most other things on the Start Menu.

*Memtest86+ [under 1MB] - Tests Memory on a x86 Computer

Wordwrap on/off in options for text settings? What, a few hundreths of a second? I don't know what that means.

1. I know2. I know Right, that's what I'm asking about - how does Wordpad compare to the replacement Notepads? I don't use Notepad, I just use Wordpad. What do the replacement Notepads offer that Wordpad doesn't?

I've never tried any of these replacement Notepads apps.... are they capable of more than Wordpad?

Christ, what does that sound like?I have zero case fans. I keep the side of my case off and have one 12" (305mm) fan blowing right into the case. No clue what the RPMs are, but it's low and I can barely hear it.

I'm a happy Ghost 2003 user but seeing as Acronis 7 is being offered for free I wouldn't mind messing around with it. I clicked the link from several posts earlier and got to the registration page and they sent me a serial #..... but where do I get the program? The only "7" I see on their site is Migrate Easy 7. Edit: I see now, "manage your registered products." The download is there as well as an update.

I got it all working now. Apparently the problem was that ACPI wasn't enabled in the BIOS when I first installed XP, and enabling it afterwards had no effect. I had to reinstall XP with ACPI enabled first. I've since installed it 3-4 times with different combinations of having almost all ports/peripherals disabled in the BIOS, and with all of them enabled, and each time I've had no problems when looking at everything in Device Manager afterwards. I never did install the RAID driver though. The board also has SATA, but the floppy that came with it says nVidia RAID Driver v1.0 and doesn't mention SATA so I didn't think I needed to install it. I'm not currently using SATA but will be when I get some new HDDs. I guess I'll find out at that time if I need the floppy driver.

Sorry for not getting back to this, been busy. The board is a DFI NF3 250-AL. The 2nd IDE channel not being recognized happened regardless of whether I had anything connected to the channel or not. At the moment the problem is fixed, but I tried so many different things that I was surprised when it finally worked and now I have to sit back and think of what I did to get it to work. I *think* it was related to a BIOS setting, either because power management wasn't set to ACPI, or this other setting I'd never seen before 'APIC mode,' and its two choices, 1.1 or 1.4. Regarding the RAID drivers... the board came with them but I didn't F6 during setup b/c I'm not using RAID and have it disabled in the BIOS. Is it still recommended that I install them? I do have XP SP1a as well as a slipstreamed SP2. I used SP2 for the install.

Closed minded or just plain dumb? She seemed to know what a computer was, so I'd venture to guess she had been in front of one before. Did she think it was just a strange coincidence that there was a little steel box either on the floor or underneath every 'screen' she had been in front of before?

This is frustrating me and I haven't been able to figure it out myself. After a fresh install of XP Pro SP2 the secondary IDE channel isn't recognized. Whatever I connect to it does show up during the POST, and is available in DOS. With a different primary HDD with Win98 installed it works fine as well. In Device Manager I get the black exclamation point on a yellow background. Device Status: This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use (Code 12). If you want to use this device you will need to disable one of the other devices on this system. Not enough free resources? Christ, I barely have anything connected as it is! One HDD, and I've disabled LAN, audio, and serial/parallel ports in the BIOS.... what else does it want, my first born? I click on the Resources tab and the IRQ 15 icon has the red circle with a line through it, with the message "Interrupt Request 15 is not available." The "use automatic settings" option is checked, but it's grayed out so I can't change it. I've tried: 1. Changing the BIOS settings for PnP devices to manual, but I still couldn't access it in Device Manager. 2. Uninstalling IDE #2 in Device Manager and letting XP recognize it during the next boot. I have this problem with a fresh install of XP, and after installing all the motherboard drivers. There's plenty of Google info regarding this Code 12, but two hours of looking through it hasn't helped me. One final thing I'll mention is that this PC isn't currently connected to the internet so I haven't gotten any updates. Suggestions welcome, giftwrapping unneccessary.

I've been reading over various partitioning strategies the past few days, and for an upcoming build the one I'm currently leaning towards is one that puts the pagefile on the first partition of a 2nd HDD. My main reason for doing it isn't necessarily to get a performance gain, but to cut down on fragmentation and to cut down on the amount of space the OS takes up, thereby making my Ghost images smaller. I haven't purchased the HDDs yet, but I was thinking of getting a 74 GB WD Raptor as the main HDD. If I put the pagefile on a slower 7200 rpm drive, will that compromise the speed of the main HDD in any way?

Supposed to be thru Friday until mdnight. I'm planning on placing an order later today, but if you want to know for sure if the promotion is still in effect just place an order and get to the checkout where you can enter the promo code. Type in PAYPALFREE and then click the buton and you'll see if it removed the S&H charges. Supposed to be thru Friday until mdnight. I'm planning on placing an order later today, but if you want to know for sure if the promotion is still in effect just place an order and get to the checkout where you can enter the promo code. Type in PAYPALFREE and then click the button and you'll see if it removed the S&H charges.

Now thru 12/15.

Looks like these are your choices: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList....alue=353%3A7873

Thanks for those links, jaclaz, much appreciated. I had this same question but I'm working on so many other things that I hadn't asked about it yet. Now I don't have to.

Just thought I'd pass this along for those unaware of it. If you use PayPal to pay for your Newegg purchases you get free shipping on orders placed through 12/10/06. I only saved $5 & change on a small order I placed last night, but on a computer case alone that could be a $20 savings. Use the promo code PAYPALFREE during checkout and it removes the shipping charges.

Ok, we're 40+ posts into this topic. My Win9x system that I love dearly software-wise, is old, hardware-wise. So let's get this thread back on topic. Maybe not the very latest in hardware, but how about some good hardware suggestions, both AMD & Intel, for a stable running Win9x system? I think I read that you should stay away from nVidia chipsets and look for a VIA based motherboard? That's all I know, really. Like I said earlier, I'm no expert, and I never even considered that Win9x wouldn't run on the newest systems. I mean, I knew that there was other hardware that didn't support Win9x, but I guess I thought a motherboard was different somehow, like it was 'root' hardware that would work with anything. But since that's obviously not the case I'd be very interested in seeing what kind of system can be built that will still run Win9x. Lets's see some examples.

I agree with what Jeremy has said for the most part. I'm a Win9x holdover myself and have only been playing around with XP for a little over a month. It's ok, nothing great, and for me personally it offers very little beyond what my MDGx-influenced Win9x does. I'm no computer expert, there are a lot of intelligent people around here who know far more than I probably ever will. I don't do anything with computers that generates any income for me, I'm just really interested in technical things and computers cartainly qualify on that front. I can build one from parts, partition and format hard drives, make Ghost images, and edit the registry without breaking a sweat. I don't know what kind of 'user' that makes me, or how many others like me there are around here. I guess it's just a hobby for me? (sure consumes enough of my time!) That said, I do kind of feel like I've been living with blinders on. I feel like I'm an 'expert' as far as Win9x goes (I'm sure I'm not though), and back when Win9x systems were the norm I never ran into a single problem I couldn't solve. I'd talk to friends on the phone, or so-and-so's girlfriend's aunt, and be able to walk them through fixing whatever their problems was. But I was so involved in my Win9x world that I completely ignored XP, and now it's been out almost 6 years I guess and I'm just now getting familiar with it. That's not good even from a hobbiest's standpoint. For anyone involved in it in any career-oriented way, you just have to stay on top of things. On the other hand, if you don't know or care about how computers work (and are completely unaware that forums like this exist where peoople happily spend hours talking about computers), and just consider having one in the house to be a necessity like a stove or refrigerator and just want to be able to click on a few icons to check your e-mail or look up something on Wikipedia, then it's unfortunate that Win9x isn't supported any longer and people are made to feel like they have to upgrade to a more current OS just to continue to perform the most basic of tasks.