Running Windows 2000 on modern motherboards - USB issues

[TheFighterJetDude]

On 7/25/2019 at 9:37 PM, Tommy said:

I'll have to research into that. But I ended up having to reinstall because "something" corrupted my last Win2000 install so badly that I couldn't even get the recovery console to find it. So I dunno what happened. But I decided to not install the X-Fi card drivers this time and just go ahead and install the Realtek drivers. This is what I ended up with.

I left the whole thing in because I do have my dual monitors working and I'm also playing audio right now via WMP11. It IS working.

I am going to look for Server sound card software. I never thought about Server/Consumer grade versions of Windows and support for >4GBs. That's some great thinking!

Now some more interesting follies. I stayed away from some of the later versions of Extended Core because videoprt.sys was flawed and would not allow for dual monitors to work, this was especially true in version 16a. For fun, I downloaded version 16d, which Blackwingcat only released in Japanese for some reason, and opened it up to poke in the files. I took notice that videoprt.sys was slightly newer in this release and language neutral. So I replaced the file included in 16a with the one in 16d and reinstalled the 16a package. Low and behold, dual monitors work. It was that single flawed file that actually was updated but not for an English release that prevents dual monitors from working. Then again, how many others but me here use dual monitors on Windows 2000?

I use 2 1080p monitors with my i3 9100f gtx 460 rig, with the 258.96 driver !

[TheFighterJetDude]

On 7/30/2019 at 12:40 AM, Tommy said:

Thank you for bringing this up! This always irked me too. I always ended up disabling the display driver helper service after setting up dual monitors.

Edit: You WILL need to brute force the INF file in order to work as Blackwingcat does, otherwise it will tell you there is no file that contains any information on your hardware, so it pretends not to see it

However, last official drivers? Which drivers are you using? I'm just curious. As I was poking around tonight, I discovered a gem, a very interesting gem that even Blackwingcat doesn't have on his blog. While he may have unofficial drivers on his site, I found a very recent (um, 9 years ago recent lol ) NVIDIA driver that actually DOES officially support Windows 2000.

https://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp-257.21-whql-driver.html
https://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp-258.96-whql-driver.html (Discovered after posting this, true last official NVIDIA Windows 2000 release)

Really? An official 2xx.xx driver from NVIDIA? Why, yes it is! How many people know about this? If you have a Quadro, you're in even better position for a newer driver!

https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/25619/en-us

Whaaaaaa????? An OFFICIALLY LISTED Windows 2000 driver!!!! However, it only lists Quadros as supported and NOT GeForce. The files are a bit smaller in this release as well but it leaves me wondering if we can break into these drivers and mod them to support newer things.

I think I'm a lot more impressed by the GeForce/Quadro release. And no, there is no need for unofficial kernels either, it works on vanilla Win2k.These gems are hard to find because of the way the driver search works, it really doesn't want you to find these older drivers, nor are they even on the older archive page. So I'd really suggest grabbing it while you can before it so happens to disappear. The best card these drivers can support are a GTX 480 which I don't think is anything at all to sneeze at. And yes, it supports dual monitors out of the box too.

Release 260.89 seems to be the first Windows XP exclusive driver, but interestingly enough keeps the win2kdualview in its driver file, so *it* may still work with a little bit of brute force.

Edit: The INF file will not work without modding it like Blackwingcat does. Add/remove hardware complains there's no file that contains information on your hardware, like it pretends it doesn't exist. If I wasn't so happy with my current installation, I'd totally try it out. Maybe someone else with a sandbox wants to try it out? Heck, it's so close and supports all the same hardware, you could probably just copy the INF file from 258.96 and edit the header information for the 260.89 release and it would possibly still work? Although it seems to be the first driver pack that has the "new" layout in files/folders.

No joke, no mods, straight off NVIDIA's website.

Since the 500 series cards are still technically Fermi , could those cards work with the 258.96 driver if they were added ?