ssmokee

If you want *decent* sounding recording, using onboard audio isnt going to cut it. They arent meant to sound good; just work. You dont need a professional quality card or anything, but even a $40-$50 sound blaster or other type addin card should make a huge difference in the amount of audible static. It also depends on the quality of the source to. Since youre trying to record from video tape, I suggest using a 4+ head hifi VCR. Was the source tape recorded in a cheap VCR (sound quality goes down fast when transferring music using consumer grade analog equipment), or was it a retail copy of a movie or something (the better choice of the two)?

Are you sure this applies to win9x? I thought only NT based windows OSes bypassed BIOS.

137 GB Limitation 137GB limit - ESDI_506.PDR and other limits, Technical background and ideas

Here is a breif interesting read on memory heat spreaders. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=29598

Atleast in the case of the P4. P-M appears to be competetive without it from what Ive seen. The AMD chips also have cache coherency (core 0 can access the L2 cache of core 1, and vice versa) which is bound to give them yet another nice advantage on dual core chips.

Considering you have a 7800GT, if the main heatsink was also touching the memory modules it would likely just transfer heat to them instead of away from them.

What is the file name and path where this list is stored? Im sure I knew where the file was before but I cant seem to find it now.

Nah, OCing the CPU alone wouldnt do that. I agree with LLXX, DDR400 running at stock speed and voltage should not get anywhere near that hot. Does you BIOS have a hardware monitor section where is shows voltages and temps? If it does check it to verify 2.5v for the RAM. I would recommend comparing the voltages from BIOS to that of a windows program (sisoft sandra, speedfan etc.), just to be safe. A dying PSU can overvolt components and damage them, but Ive only ever seen that happen once. Edit: Air circulation...do you atleast have one case fan in that system exhausting hot air out the back?

The system wouldnt draw much power in that senario. You need to see how it does under heavy load.

98se driver performance hasnt been a priority at nvidia for ages, whereas XP has been in the forefront for some time now. If you used a motherboard that was in its prime when 98se was (probably something with a VIA KT266a or SiS 735 chipset) I bet you would see much closer results as you did with the celeron system.

If you want to know how to make the most of that board you should check out this forum. Becareful about those 1GB DDR modules...I think 512MB is the max size per DIMM on the K7S5A. As far as overclocking goes I think the "honeyX" BIOS is what you want (see forum I linked to for more info). Is that XP 1900+ chip a tbred B core? If it is then you should have some good old fashioned overclocking fun in your near future. If the chip is a palamino or tbred A core, you should still be able to get some increase in speed, but dont expect tbred B style overclocks from it. Edit: To get a big overclock, you will need to unlock the CPU though

Actually now that I think about it I might have some useful info. The audio problem didnt start (atleast not that I remember) until I updated the hardware in the computer that I built the base image on, and once that happended I rebuilt the image from scratch just to be safe. The difference audio wise from the first setup to the second setup was the first hardware build involved an ISA soundblaster awe32, and the second was the onboard sound that comes with the asus a7s8x-mx. I really cant say anything else at the moment because I dont have a computer to test 98se on (been out of the 98se scene for a while because of it). Im picking up a new motherboard and cpu on Monday, so I should be back to having a dedicated 98se machine shortly. Once that happens I will try to verify what I said about the ghost image from the older hardware build NOT having problems with preferred audio device.

Im not sure what you mean. Is that what changes when you use the native SATA power connecter vs the older 4pin molex style (I see the WD drive has both)? If yes, which connector goes to what rail?

Is that a SATA 2 hard drive? If so, that is likely your problem. The VIA 8237 southbridge doesnt like SATA 2 drives. I think the WD drives have some kind of compatability mode you can set (using a jumper on the drive) to force SATA 1 speeds and make it work with that board.

Doesnt it seem equally odd that the P4's dont outperform K8/P-M by the margin of their clockspeed advantage?

Are you overvolting your memory?

Was the ghost image built on the same machine you are now having the audio problems with, or different? I use the ghost/delete enum key method and I did come across the problem you are describing once or twice.

Have you partitioned and formatted the drive yet? Control Panel -> Admin Tools -> Computer Management, then select Disk Management

I agree enthusiasts would spend the money more wisely, but dont forget about the demographic with more money than brains. Its a frickin big demographic!

What Service Pack (if any) does your XP CD have intergrated? For your 160GB drive you need 48 bit LBA, and that wasnt updated until XP SP 1a .

You mean other than you putting everything together and trying it out? No. The power supply will likely cut it for general usage when your video card isnt doing 3d accelaration (and therefor isnt using much power). Gaming is a completely different story though since both the CPU and video card are under heavy load at the same time, and I would be surprised if your power supply could keep voltages stable with an opteron 165 and a 7800gt. If you decide to take the risk, use speedfan (or something else) and set it up to monitor and log your voltages.

Likely a weak video card. The amount of RAM on a video card is not an indicator of performance, atleast by itself. You need the amount of RAM, speed of RAM, memory bus width and GPU make/model.

Looks like it is just setting an environment variable. What it does exactly depends on who wrote the config.sys and autoexec.bat files.

Does your router let you prioritize traffic? If it does, set bittorent (P2P) traffic lower than http.

Both of those will be faster than a 3000+ s939. The x2 3800+ should be the same as a 3200+.