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And I've had no worries. Sata Dvd burner is Sony's AD-5200S connected to an ich10r, mobo is Ga-ep45-ud3r with Bios F4. OS are W2k heavily HfSlipped to December 2007 as well as Xp with integral Sp2. These combinations worked: - Bios in P-Ata compatibility mode, W2k with no F6 driver; boots abnormally slowly; - Bios in S-Ata Ahci mode, W2k with BlackWingCat's Ahci/Raid driver used in F6 mode; boots much faster; - Bios in S-Ata Ahci mode, Xp with Intel's iastor v8.7 used in F6 mode; boots very fast.

Oops, this is the picture at Lexar's site: http://store.lexar.com/?productid=CF4GB-300-381 and it looks like the ones at Chinese sellers, not like the ones at ballcourt155ab... Did I miss some new development about globalization or subprime crisis?

Well then, if you try the paging file on a CF card before I do, please tell us! Because I have W2k on an excellent i815ep+PIIIs. As usual, Intel chipsets are faster than the competitors (...almost all, almost always) BUT limit the Ram amount to small values which are difficult to explain through technology - let's put it like this. In my case, 512MB, which is quite enough for W2k and even Avast and Comodo, but gets narrow if adding Ski Challenge or Google Earth +Google Maps. So I consider adding again a Raid-0 on the Pci (which I measured on the i815ep at 124MB/s before overclocking, versus 60MB/s for Via or Sis). ------- Beware more and more CF cards are fake. I knew finding an authentic Extreme on eBay is nearly impossible, now I've seen A-Data and Lexar from HK and China and Australia which really look fake. To try to guess it, download pictures from the manufacturer, and compare with the seller, hoping he sells what's on his pictures. Fakes often differ by the form of the metal plate under the front side sticker. Sometimes even the sticker differs: my genuine (fast) A-Data put their capacity on it... Seen very attractive offers on eBay.com today, for Lexar 300x (Atto measurements at 8GB give exactly the excellent speeds of my 8GB A-Data 266x, probably the same hardware chip for chip). There for 2GB, 59usd for 3 pieces: http://photography.shop.ebay.com/Memory-Ca...sop=1&_sc=1 notice the pictures by ballcourt155ab differ from Chinese sellers... W2k started from one such A-Data CF a bit faster than from my excellent J8080. Then, every directory operation was much faster than with the Hdd. Putting the paging file on a CF Raid could hence be nice. Seen recently 600x speeds on a CF, but it's Mlc technology, slow at Windows' small files.

Be careful with Internet Explorer, as it brings many updates to W95. They are highly useful, plentiful, and I'm not even sure all can install separately and are still available. Back then, updating Internet Explorer was the standard Microsoft method to update Windows, and ie5.50sp2 is the very first update I add to a fresh W95. Maybe an alternative way to increase the amount of fast memory? Add a fast Compact Flash card (like A-Data 266x) on a P-Ata adapter, and define the paging file on the resulting "hard drive". Be careful when selecting the CF card, as most cards are very slow on small files; MB/s and ms aren't the whole picture, look at 4kB random writes and 150kB random reads on IOMeter for instance. A P-Ata/33 host is already interesting, as your Ram is probably at 150MB/s read and 80MB/s write. However, you can add a fast P-Ata host card on the Pci. The SiI680a chip makes the smartest, cheapest and fastest cards (from Hong Kong through eBay), but W95 ability is doubtful; HighPoint RocketRaid 100 and (same chip) DawiControl DC-100 do have the W95 drivers, I used them successfully on W95b. Then two good 266x CF in Raid-0 would give about 90MB/s read and 60MB/s write through the Pci (...an Intel Pci, not a Via one...) which is nearly the speed of your Ram. Seen recently A-Data 266x CF at 26€ for 2GB - though 2*2GB may not be mandatory for your paging file... And a SiI680a card costs some 10€ with shipping. Then, you can install much software in you CF raid, including Win, even if the CF aren't "fixed disks" - no importance through a Raid host, and no importance to W95 anyway. But I guess W95 already boots in <20s on your config, and the limit is at about 8s however fast your disks. Well, another mobo with Isa and more Ram is probably cheaper... You just avoid reinstalling the software. W95 has some limit at 512MB Ram. I ignore if this limit applies to Ram+Paging. And solutions are described elsewhere on this forum.

Defective Ram, maybe. Memtest86+. Ram drawing too much power, no! It's negligible, compared with the graphics card and the Cpu. Some bug with Vista or the Bios or the chipset at 24GB: maybe. You didn't tell which flavour of Vista shall run on this computer. Home Basic stops at 8GB and Home Premium at 16GB - though I'd expect the installation disk to tell something then.

Hello everybody! Used Office 97 Pro up to now, saw no clear reason to change. And then I used a really affordable opportunity to buy a used Office 2003 Pro. Installed on my St3500418as+E8600+P45+ich10r, it is very fast, that's an excellent surprise. 1/3s to open Word after reboot. Though I didn't try on my PIIIs nor my P1mmx... But the very first hurdle is passed brilliantly. Now, having tried o2003 briefly (still haven't activated it), I haven't seen real decisive advantages over o97... Do you see some? I mean, better functions for the user. Not compatibilities and file formats, I don't care. - Dictionaries and spelling correction in several languages, that's nice. But I miss one language, and there's no significant grammar capability. - User Interface is in one language only, isn't it? Putting more would need an additional GUI, which costs more and seems impossible to obtain for o2003. - It still gets security patches, but this won't last for o2003 neither, and I don't care anyway. - Some bugs are improved, like column and page width interactions in Word. - Diagrams are still as complicated and unnatural in Excel. Formatting in Excel, as well. - Can the Equation Editor still be used alone? I didn't find it. - Write-protected individual cells in Excel, may be useful from time to time. Please refrain from answering "Open Office", I know it already, thanks.

Confirm. Ff3.50 and 3.52 are worse on YouTube and other videos. Thanks to have pinpointed the cause! Ff3.50 and 3.52 have other drawbacks. Nothing damning, but interface choices (leave the app open if no document displayed...) that are less comfortable now. And the improvements I hoped (a working mouse scroll, compatible with my added driver 4dmain.exe) don't arrive. I'll revert to Ff3.00 next.

Hi Blackwingcat, nice to read you here! Many thanks for your drivers! I still haven't tried drivers - yours neither - but I will do it. I also have a Sata SSD meanwhile, and it shows >200MB/s on the P45+Ich10r, with Bios in Legacy (or Ata or whatever it calls it) mode, just the Intel Inf files, and no added driver for the Ich10r. But: my win is still slow to start (35s for W2k on an X25E!) and I hope the proper driver will improve it. If not, it will be a matter of slow hardware detection.

The solution that works now was to replace the XFX 9600gso by a Gigabyte 8600gt. It takes 3-4s before the Bios gets the screen, instead of >10s. After the Bios, Win also starts faster. The 8600gt has less GFlops than the 9600gso, but nearly as many GB/s (in this 256MB Gddr3 version), and benchmarks don't show a factor-of-three, they show some 30% less performance instead. Which is still more than enough for my uses. Better: power drain has dropped a lot. My 8600gt is passively cooled, which solved as well the startup noise that annoyed me with the 9600gso. And the whole room is cooler - a significant difference in Summer.

Thanks again! Noted down at a well-chosen place. I wonder why some graphics cards take extra time. After all, the only difference between various integrator brands is the cooler, size and type of Ram, Vga/Dvi outputs... And the logo displayed at bootup. Could it possibly be that Xfx introduced a no-operation delay so that its logo appears during bootup?

Size of the driver: I don't have this computer running right now, but the exe and dll for 32b Win total 50MB - they're common to all 32b Win in this Wdm driver. Sound card: if I still observe the effect on boot time I certainly switch off the Alc889a. Faster Gpu: yes, one that doesn't waste time a power on. Probably a smaller Gpu with a less noisy fan. Faster Cpu: it's already an E8600 - I believe the fastest one on single and double task. I haven't pushed it at all up to now, it runs 1M digits SuperPi in 13s. Intel Ssd: I'll have first try a Raid-0 since I've two disks, but this doesn't improve boot time much, usually. The Ssd is certainly an option.

Well, this is one of the failure modes of Crt's electronics, yes. Others being colours going crazy, lost sync, bad vertical or horizontal extension, and a few more. You may first check if you've a magnet near to the screen, possibly within a device like a loudspeaker. These failure modes don't exist on Lcd, but I'm confident we'll learn other ones over time. A Crt can be repaired, either by replacing whole assemblies if you find another broken Crt of the same model, or by replacing the broken component... But this knowledge has vanished, and such a repair consumes time. There's another solution though, if you live in a densely populated area: have a look at eBay. There you find used Crt dirt-cheap, like 20 usd. Often very nice ones, like 21" or 22", with the better 4:3 fornat and 1600*1200 pixels that accommodates a full paper sheet, and colours nicer than on an Lcd. Perfect for a deep desk and a fast-transmitting Vga card. Sellers usually don't ship Crt, so living in or near a city is better. And as Crt do fail over time, it's wise to ask (before buying...) the seller for a demo before paying the item.

Yes, ten millions microseconds! Well, the Bios setups are already optimized pretty much as you suggest, and the OS seemingly doesn't take that long. My impression is that this mobo boots slowly because hardware detection is so slow on it. I've had a look again at the driver for this Alc889a: Realtek gives only one edition which weighs 68MB (sixty-eight billions millibytes...) once expanded, of which each OS needs the most part. This looks huge enough (nearly as big as W2k itself!) to explain the added boot time, which would just be driver load time. SSD: I'm still comparing prices and try to compare speeds - as MB/s aren't the whole picture. Probably the next step. But if hardware detection takes the most time, I'd improve the shortest part. I really like your idea with the Usb speakers. I still don't have speakers for this machine, and have 8 Usb directly at the rear side plus a handful on the mobo. Looks great. Thanks!

Thanks Zenskas! Well, I'm fed up with waiting for computers to start. And once again, progress in hardware is offset by ever worse written software, slower peripherals detection, etc. My Tualatin 1500MHz boots as fast as the C2D does despite the *6 to *20 harware speed improvement, I don't want to accept that. Could you tell me the brand and model of your 9600gt that boots quickly, and possibly of the slower one you've seen? Thanks!

Hello! Got a Gigabyte ep45-ud3r in my new config (+E8600 +Seagate 7200.12 500GB) and Windows' bootup is slowed down by the integrated audio. Not just a bit: nearly 10 s (TEN THOUSAND MILLISECONDS), both with W2k and Xp, with both Ntdetect versions. Drivers are properly installed for Intel's Azalia channel as well as Realtek's Alc889a, KB888111 is also present. When I disable the integrated audio in Bios settings, the config is less slow. At least it boots a bit faster than my PIIIs 1400MHz then, but nothing brilliant (38s for W2k as for Xp, very disappointed). The difference appears at the phase when the progress bar stops and peripherals successively blink, for instance the keyboard - I believe Win detects hardware and loads drivers in this phase. Has someone an idea? As the driver for the Alc889a weighs over 10MB I suspect it could take time to load. Did someone find and try a faster one? Or is there something I can do? Without a better response, I would disable the integrated audio and put an old Ac97 audio card in one Pci slot. I don't care these sound gadgets anyway, and I dislike the DRM that comes with KB888111 and High-Definition Audio. If I didn't want to save my Pci slots it would already be done.

Hello everybody! Got an nVidia 9600gso in my new config. More than enough for my needs: the fan stays at idle in Ski Challenge 2009. Trouble: when I start the computer, the 9600gso takes more than 5s (more than five thousand milliseconds!) before giving control back to the mobo's Bios, and I dislike this delay. So: - Is there something I can do (Suppress Ram testing?) maybe in the Coolbits to speed it up? - Are all nVidia dX10 cards that slow at startup, or do you have quicker ones? I'd like to stick at nVidia as they offer W2k drivers for their dX10 cards. Thanks!

Ciao Jaclaz! Hmmm, so it's not completely obvious. My Bios has an Ide compatibility mode for the Ich10r (with measured full Sata2 performance including Ncq) which I can use with W2k if not going Raid nor Ahci, so in this case chances are with me. I'm discovering slowly (1 tower, 1 power supply etc for 2 computers, the other must operate every day = bad idea) my new hardware. I have a secondary Sata2 +Pata controller from JMicron on the Mobo, this one would offer official W2k drivers for Raid and Ahci, but as it looks now, I lose the Pata port if using Raid or Ahci modes on the Sata ports of this controller. So several incompatibilities are messing up here. It could be that I need a Sata Dvd drive to use the Ahci features (or Raid, but performance is probably bad with JMicron) with W2k on this mobo. Grazie!

Thanks Ponch! Well, the French azerty keyboard has some characters for French (but not even the hyphenated capital letters, what a shame) and gets impractical for Spanish and Portuguese, as its hyphens aren't dead keys and thus offer no means to produce the áíóúÁÍÓÚ for instance. Each sentence containing ten of them, it gets boring. For that same reason, typing the Ascii code isn't a wonderful solution as I'd need to do it too often; faster than copy-paste for sure but still long. I enjoyed dead keys for hyphens when using the German qwertz keyboard. It takes two hits to produce an é instead of one on the French azerty, but then the qwertz easily produces the É for French and the áíóú for Spanish and Portuguese. The German qwertz is no global solution as it lacks a ç for instance, but its dead keys that hyphenate all letters are definitely the right direction as I can't add 50 keys to the keyboard. Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator: yes. I'll definitely consider it (or one of its competitors) if I don't find a nice existing keyboard. Some layouts were made available by their authors, for instance http://home.pro.tiscali.be/~fbou2235/kbdfr...#Telechargement which is very good for French but doesn't improve Portuguese. [Edit: 404 meanwhile. Author was Denis Liégeois, he called his layout Français Enrichi] I'm a bit wary against loading a special layout. My intuition tells me that some applications won't use it (just like Firefox doesn't use my scrolling mouse driver for instance), there will be incompatibilities, or it will not run identically on several computers, or in F8 mode or in the console... You know, just the usual paranoia of any computer user. But this may well become the answer for lack of a better one.

That's a VERY BIG fine, but the EU has VERY BIG budget needs as well... I don't remember exactly what, but the US gov had done something unpleasant to the EU just before, so the instant was ripe for this action. What I strongly dislike with such a justice is that the decision is made by a (inter-) governmental agency. The EU Commission itself decides a fine. This is not the way a democracy works, and as a direct consequence, its work doesn't meet democratic standards neither. That is, national governments compose a EU Commission which both makes laws and the application of laws. Even worse, the EU Parliament does not oversee the EU Commission: it can't veto a decision by the Commission, and if Lisbon's Treaty passes, the Parliament won't even be allowed to decide what it discusses nor what law it would like to "suggest" (as it couldn't decide against the Commission) to the Commission. The Commission concentrates legislative, executive and judicial powers in one hand - exactly the first step a democratic Constitution would avoid. And then you get so-called "justice decisions" and "fines" which may serve just the politicians' views at some time. That's no Justice.

If creating a Raid-01 or Raid-10 with 4 disks from a Raid-0 with 2 disks, I expect that Intel is able to duplicate the data to the new two disks as RocketRaid, FastTrak, Promise and Silicon Image are. If making a Raid-0 with your four disks, chances to keep your data are clearly worse - though I can only tell that old RocketRaid, FastTrak, Promise and Silicon Image controllers couldn't. One difficulty is that such Raid Bios' usually can't speak Fat32 not Ntfs nor any file system, they just know sector numbers and partitions. Though they'd have to move data within the disks from 2 to 4 disks in Raid-0, and at some point, this may interfere with the file system - even if you keep the size of all existing volumes, thus totalling only 320GB in your case. A few interferences are less than obvious with Raid-0. For instance, W2k sp0 can't start from a Raid-0 with some specific stripe sizes because of a bug; one has to integrate the Sp4 on the installation Cd to overcome it - even with Raid controllers which allegedly show the group only as a single disk. Also, this operation would be risky, as it needs to write sectors in a zone that still contains the data at original place. You have room enough to store the data temporarily, but if the operation is interrupted, bad luck. Would Intel take this risk? If a software exists for that purpose (I'd already have enjoyed one) I expect it to look less like a Bios and more like GParted: a bootable CD that launches a complete OS with a single application on it. ---- Now, if you can save the old Raid's contents somewhere else, you may try simple methods to paste it back on the new Raid. One could look like: Use a spare disk (even 8GB 5400rpm, never throw them away) to put a minimum OS on it that speaks your file system. Use this disk to save the apparent contents of the old Raid. You need all hidden and system files but not the Mbr, boot sector etc, and NOT Ntfs' System Volume Information. You should purge IE's cache before, to save copy time. Break the old Raid group, create the new one, install your OS on it, make volumes compatible with the ones you had. With the spare disk, suppress the contents of the new OS. You now have left the volumes, Mbr, boot sector. Though I'd keep Win.ini and a few more as well in a separate location just in case. Yes, an OS for a few sectors is a bit of a waste , but you save your time as compared to clever methods. And booting on the spare disk, paste on the new Raid, volume by volume, the contents you had saved from the old Raid, including OS files. I did it to replace one disk with another on an XP machine, I could keep the whole OS, user profiles and tunings, files and their protections, activation aso. Stupid, rather quick, nice. I didn't try with raid - your data, your risk. Ubuntu's bootable CD now speak Ntfs and many more and might replace the spare disk, but I didn't try. ---- Other methods would involve pasting the old contents on the new Raid group and asking the installation Cd to "repair" the OS. You lose some tunings like the renaming of Program Files if any.

Now that's a quick and precise answer! Thank you so much - Merci bien - Dank U wel - Dankeschön!

Hi Col O'Neill, I briefly tried the 7.6 drivers modified by BlackWingCat, with no success up to now, but as I discover the Ich10r +IntelStorage +C2D +ddr +Sata +Ahci +PciE +Firewire +Alc889a +Lan1G all at the same time, I've probably done many things wrong (built no array for instance), and will go on trying. Anyway, I've had a brief look at the contents of BWC's driver. The Setup.exe refused something (-> W2k) at my machine as well. Though I didn't check every file, I saw that BWC improved \Winall\Driver\IaStor.sys: his makes no single call to Hal.dll nor Ntoskrnl.exe entries specific to Xp, as opposed to Intel's original file. This is the actual driver file used both in Ahci and Raid modes, as defined in \Winall\Driver\Txtsetup.oem (just as the Intel original does it). Note the invalid signature of the modified IaStor.sys (of course) and tell Win not to worry about. So the method should be to install through Winall\Driver\Txtsetup.oem (if copying Winall\Driver on an F6 diskette for a new installation) or through Winall\Driver\iaahci.inf or iastor.inf (on an existing Win). I haven't tried up to now, tell me if you do before I do.

Meanwhile I've received my mobo with chipset Ich10r and know answers to (2) and (6), here they are: (2) Without any driver, Ich10r runs at full throttle in IDE mode, thus enabling W2k. With 500GB Seagate 7200.12 drives, Atto sees the expected contiguous read speed of 134MB/s and huge throughputs on small files, absolutely identical to what it sees on Xp with Ahci mode chosen in the Bios, and with improvement at Q=10 and Q=4 versus "no overlapped I/O", so the Ncq works even with Ide settings - which isn't that surprising, as the equivalent of Ncq was introduced with Ata/5 (Udma/100). HdTach also sees buffer read speeds of 260MB/s so transmission is at Sata300 speed. So the only limits to W2k, that is without the Ahci and Raid drivers, are that W2k can't exploit Raid arrays using the Intel driver, nor should it be able to use hot plugging brought by Ahci (well, I didn't try that last one actually). (6) As UniAta doesn't answer these limitations up to now (Raid and Ahci), it doesn't bring more features to W2k on Ich8..Ich10r, so I didn't try it. But it certainly is useful, for instance to transfer an OS disk from one disk host to another of a different type - said to work with UniAta.

Hello you all! I plan to have a Sata CD/DVD drive on my new config. I've already seen that the W2k installation disk has no difficulties with Sata HDD on this mobo. Has anybody seen worries related with the Dvd drive interface in this case? Thanks!

XnView here as well. It's free and multilingual and does more than a displayer (convert, resize, lossless rotate etc), it's much faster than most competitors, and it has a nice and quick browser that doesn't peddle additional files in every folder. Its v1.82.4 even runs on W95a-95b. http://download.Xnview.com/old_versions As v1.93.6 was the latest one, it was said to run on W98-98se-Me. http://download.xnview.com/XnView-win.zip