raskren

Boot times would probably impress Joe but who is to say that an A64 is significantly faster in the boot process? I also wouldn't go so far as to say that the 3000+ beats the pants off of the Pentium. Joe doesn't use Photoshop so anything you do in there probably won't impress him. UT2003/2004 LOVES the A64 architecture so run some botmatches on both machines and graph the results. A64 will win by a significant amount. Use 3Dmark2001 SE as well. You'll want to stay away from media encoding tasks, Divx, Windows Media, Premiere, Maya, etc. The Pentium will usually win in this scenario. Many office productivity suites favor the Athlon's cache so you could run some lengthy macros in Word and time them.

64 bit power! Cool n' Quiet technology! 2Ghz Hypertransport! 3DNow! Professional Technology! Its hard to impress someone of average computer intelligence with something as technical as a CPU without using "buzzwords" like these. Not that there's anything wrong with it. Can you say Centrino? NetBurst? The buyer is utimately going to make a decision based on the pros and cons of each product. Right now its tough to overcome Intel's agressive marketing campaigns when trying to convince Joe Sixpack that AMD chips have advantages in certain areas. It would be helpful to know if your friend is going to do a live demonstration of AMD vs Intel. Then I could probably pick out some benchmarks/apps/games where AMD will mop the floor. Combine this with the buzzwords and you may have a winning combination.

Ok, and my quotes aren't working because.....?

prathapml, Sorry, but I don't check my inbox that often. It looks like that thread has been beaten to death already. Currently, if I were in the market for a new CPU I would seriously consider an A64 Nforce 3 combo, but this is not a good time for making long-term purchases. I currently have a 3.4 Ghz P4 (overclocked Northwood) and I am very happy with it. In an overclocked environment (fast DDR memory to feed it) it is still very competitive with AMD's latest. I do a lot of 3D rendering in Lightwave and the Pentium 4C with hyperthreading can shave hours off of a complicated scene. So, keeping the P4 just makes sense for me. The amount of engineering that has gone into the A64 is very impressive, but I doubt that the 64 bit extensions will really be the "holy grail" that the AMDroids are hoping for. There are very few (relatively) that can truly take advantage of the ability to use >4GB of RAM and even fewer that are willing/able to work in a true 64 bit environment on x86-64 hardware (only Linux, UNIX currently). Keep in mind that I'm not talking about servers here, I'm thinking of desktops. True, but only available in an unreleased Windows Xp service pack. Intel will be rolling this out in Prescott shortly. SSE2 is really all that matters since most professional apps rely heavily on SSE2 (Lightwave as I mentioned earlier). Prescott has SSE3 support, A64 does not. What is a "good" speed? You should tout the A64's higher IPC rather than overall clock frequency. The fact that it uses less power may be significant for some, i.e. those purchasing a room full of computers for a lab, etc. By the time we have a mature 64 bit Windows OS the A64 arcitecture will be antiquated. See above. Not true. Multithreaded apps love a P4 with HT. There are some cases where the A64 is faster though. Dx9 games are much more GPU (instead of CPU) bound than Dx8- games. A P4 paired with a high-end graphics card will also give superb dx9 performance. The CPU present in the user's machine also has nothing to do with image quality in Dx (or OpenGL for that matter). Its difficult to link how long your OS installs with memory bandwidth. I would mention the fact that the A64 has an on-die memory controller and paired with low latency DDR you can expect very good performance.

Yes, I think I know why! It looks like you're trying to use SATA drivers from the CD or floppy without slipstreaming...correct? If you have OEMPreinstall=Y (or is it 1, I can't remember) in winnt.sif you will always get this error. The solution is to either slipstream the drivers onto the CD or set OEMPreinstall=N. Here's how to slipstream the drivers: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=13173

Yeah, forget about Style XP for themes in msstyle format. What you can do is write a .theme file to use the msstyle scheme and then specify that .theme file in winnt.sif. Windows will then use the specified theme instead of Luna (gettin' old, isn't it?). For this you work you will need to slipstream the hacked uxtheme.dll file - instructions for writing .theme files and slipstreaming the DLL can be found on this site. Search is your friend.

Please provide us with the method that you used to slipstream the drivers and what driver files you have used. Slipstreaming may be the only way to get Xp onto your RAID array.

Nevermind. Here it is: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=16824&st=20 According to this post, files extracted from driver.cab are handled by txtsetup.sif.

Well, looking in driver.cab...there's no INF files. Mostly DLL, INI, GPD, and SYS. It appears that \i386\DRVINDEX.INF contains a list of all the files contained in driver.cab and sp1.cab, but there's no install information contained in this file, just a list of file names. Where/how does Windows figure out which driver in driver.cab goes with which hardware device?

I suppose you could have problems (setup aborting) using unsigned drivers, but its an interesting idea. You might have to re-checksum driver.cab again as well.

The TEXTMODE driver function doesn't work when booting from a CD.

If the guide explains how to modify txtsetup.sif, then yes, it should work for onboard SATA, SCSI, and RAID combinations, as well as PCI based controller cards of various flavors.

I can verify that DWM effects work properly on the DX9 ATi cards. That big black border that you were seeing is supposed to be a partially transparent green border. It appears that an older card is not able to implement the transparency properly. Good choice with the 9600 Pro. Excellent card, excellent value, excellent overclocker!

If I remember correctly, the type of networking that you setup for your VM refers to how the virtual nic will interface with your actual nic. If you're at home using broadband or dial-up the best choice is usually NAT. I was able to get 4074 running in VMware 4.5.1 and I had no problems getting internet access. I'd try installing the VMware tools again.

Here's an off the wall question. Has anyone thought of adding Media Center features to plain old Windows Xp Pro? I have a copy of MCE and I've been looking through it lately, trying to figure out if this is possible - inconclusive at this point. Anyone?

What's in sysdata.xml?

Sorry, let me correct what I said. It sounds like the error is on your buddy's end. Apply everything I said in the previous post to the target machine. You shouldn't have to open the port on your end for this to work. Another issue is the dial-up account itself. Its probably a dynamic IP and changes everytime you re-connect with the modem. For this to work (email) you will have to reply to the invitation before the sender hangs up and reconnects (thus changing the IP).

MSN messenger is not the only way. I've used this many times on machines with messenger completely removed. There are a couple things that could cause this. The first thing I would check are required services and dependencies. Then do a netstat to see if Windows is listening on port 3389. If it is, then Remote Assistance is probably configured correctly. Then make sure that port is open all the way to the desktop. That is, hardware firewall>router>software firewall.

Winguides is quick to publish registry keys that don't do anything, like the infamous IRQ priority tweak. What a waste of time. How about the QoS tweak...does nothing. Its a good place to locate tweaks that you've forgotten but I wouldn't use that site for starting from scratch.

Doesn't your kernel file need to be re-checksum'd before adding? I've never been able to modify a file, recompress, and simply add it back to the cd without adding a checksum - Windows setup halts when it tries to copy the file.

Photoshop 7 or CS, there is no other. CS makes you register and activate the software though (similar to XP) which is somewhat annoying. I'm actually surprised that no one has said "The GIMP!" Oh wait, this is the Microsoft forum network. Seriously, I've used 6, 6.5, 7 and now CS; PS is the best there is.

Add detailed information in device manager. This is much different than show nonpresent devices. Enabling this gives you the details tab as shown in the attached screenshot. The best thing it adds is the PCI ID string. I was able to "hack" a set of scanner drivers to get them working when Windows said the drivers wouldn't. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment] "DEVMGR_SHOW_DETAILS"="1"

Moves IE browser cache to C:\Temp Sorry, the tweak I had here doesn't work reliably, so I pulled it. Does anyone know how to change the default cache size to a static value instead of a percentage of disk space? [Edit] Wait, I think its the hex value: 24,01,00,00. So this key will also change your cache to 10MB?

Turns numlock key ON at first boot. Change value to "0" for OFF. [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Keyboard] "InitialKeyboardIndicators"="2"

Here's a warning - the code below is NOT compatible with all computers. Use this at your own risk. If you have an ATi video card and 1GB of ram or more the tweak "LargeSystemCache=dword:00000001" will cause serious data corruption. Its happened to me. The L2 cache "tweak" has proven useless. Install it if you wish, but it has absolutely ZERO effect. Its a leftover from Windows NT days when L2 cache was off-die. ;RAM usage tweaks [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management] "DisablePagingExecutive"=dword:00000001 "LargeSystemCache"=dword:00000001 "IoPageLockLimit"=dword:1bf00000 "SecondLevelDataCache"=dword:00000100 ;AMD Processor Fix [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management] "LargePageMinimum"=dword:ffffffff The IRQ priority "tweak" (posted before this one) also does absolutely nothing. Again, I've had it enabled in the registry and it doesn't seem to do any harm, but it doesn't do any good either. The 2nd level data cache and IRQ "tweaks" are probably the two most common useless-tweaks I see all over the internet!