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Paul
Seum said:Thanks once more Paul.
I tried to follow some of your suggestions today, especially about the
video card. I had 4 video cards ready and had drivers for two of them.
Guess what? None of the video cards fit. The end of the teeth on each
card was about 3/16" past the end of the slot the teeth were supposed to
go into. I loosened all the screws holding down the board and pushed it
back as far from the rear as possible but it made no difference. Seems
that the board was moved closer to the rear of the computer when
manufactured. I have had at least 6 motherboards in that box over the
years and I never had this problem.
I have also been trying to get a HD that I can try to install Win2K on.
I have a SATA and I managed to reduce the size of one partition on it to
114GB. Today I put the SATA drive into its external case and hooked it
up to Advent. I looked for the format and was offered NTSF and ExFat. I
chose NTSF and am hoping that this is the NTFS that accomodates Win2K.
Have a great weekend
Win2K can use NTFS or FAT32.
For FAT32, you can use the Ridgecrop FAT32 formatter,
when Windows refuses to handle a large FAT32 partition. The
Ridgecrop formatter can make FAT32 on a 2TB partition. But
it doesn't make sense to do that (wasteful). I think Windows has a
much lower limit, like 32GB or so for FAT32, which is also ridiculous.
NTFS has a few advantages. It supports attributes, and maybe someone
in an IT setting finds that a more secure way to run the OS. It can
handle filesizes larger than 4GB. And it is journaled, meaning it
handles abrupt termination better than FAT32 would.
You set the BIOS for the SATA to IDE, plug in the SATA drive,
and start installing.
*******
With regard to video cards, there are at least three types.
PCI - 133MB/sec (dog slow). Quite a common slot type, but your
worst choice.
AGP - Up to 2133MB/sec (anything over 1066MB/sec is plenty)
PCI Express - Up to 8000MB/sec (and perhaps soon, a bit more)
Your older video cards might have been AGP, and the AGP card won't fit
in a PCI Express x16 slot. And they don't make adapters.
In this photo, all three slot types are depicted. They have
different offsets on purpose. Brown is AGP and is furthest away.
Purple is PCI Express x16. And the four white ones are the slow
PCI slots.
http://www.asrock.com/mb/photo/4CoreDual-SATA2 R2.0(l).jpg
I have one PCI video card. If you have a large bitmap, and
a tool that doesn't handle bitmaps properly, such that the bitmap
must be redrawn, movement of the image becomes jerky. So PCI
simply isn't a practical solution. It works most of the time,
but the first time it gets jerky, you're going to be annoyed.
So PCI isn't much of an option. The other two types are what
you want.
I got lucky on the last card I bought. BFG was going out of
business, and released a batch of warranty return replacement
cards. And I got one for $65, and it's been excellent.
I don't know exactly, what the last Win2K driver is from Nvidia.
You can click the "Products Supported" on this one, to get some
idea of what cards are supported. The 7900GT is on this
list, and 7900GT is PCI Express.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_94.24_2.html
You can also spend (waste) some time here, looking for the
"last driver". I think I've tried this in the past, and
it was pretty frustrating. At least one of these is
labeled Win2K, when it actually isn't.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp-2k_archive.html
So what you do, is identify the last driver provided
for an OS, get the "supported products" list, and then
find the best (available) card in the list. I got
really really lucky on mine, that I just happened to
plop onto the web page of the card I eventually bought.
When I first saw it, I was saying "but that card is
four years old - why are they selling that as a new
item ?". But when I checked into the details, the four
years old aspect also made it a good candidate for my dual
OS project.
If I'd bought a more recent and more powerful card, it would
have been a great WinXP card, but a poor Win2K card. The 7900GT
isn't the fastest card around, but it does play games in
both OSes.
This is an example of something else from that list, and
might be cheap, if you could find one. 6200 cards
come in all three flavors. You can still find PCI and AGP
ones, but the PCI Express one is likely to be long gone.
There is no reason to make it (since there are so many
other, cheap, PCI Express cards). This would be good
for a basic frame buffer, but not for gaming. A card like
this, spans a pretty wide range of Windows drivers.
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=V6200-128P&cat=VCD
I tried a similar exercise with AMD, but I'm not making
much progress. Catalyst 6.2 *might* be the official last
driver for Win2K, but various people seem to be hacking
later drivers.
Paul
