Moving to Win2K

[Ribbit]

Well, I did a couple of things to my machine last weekend:

• Deliberately installed a second processor.
• Accidently trashed my Win98SE boot partition.

Now perhaps the second item was down to divine intervention or something, but it's made me think about switching to Win2K as my gaming OS. (Let me take a moment to stress this - I use Windows for games and games only. No web browsing, no email, no wordprocessing, no office stuff, no MP3 playing, just games. Everything else I do with Linux.) Win2K can make use of my second processor, '98 is screwed if I upgrade past my 512M of memory, and also hardware companies are supporting win2k better than '98.

So my Win2K questions for the wise:

• How do I remove Internet Explorer, or at least stop it preloading itself at boot-time?
• Actually, how do I do that in general? (Things like the Task Scheduler come to mind.)
• With Win98, I used 98lite to remove IE and a lot of other unnecessary junk. Is there anything like that for Win2K?
• I hear that FAT32 is faster than NTFS. Right?
• Is there a way to turn off that annoying feature of the start menus where they only show what you've recently used until you click on the arrows at the bottom?
• Most of my hardware is from companies who I'm pretty confident would make sure their drivers are SMP-safe (LSI, Matrox, AMD, 3Com). But I'm not so sure about the soundcard (a Hoontech Trident 4DWave). Is there a good way to stress-test the drivers for SMP-safety?

Other advice is welcomed (like "don't install Service Pack X without doing Y!!!", etc.) Or given the application (gaming), should I just stick with Win98SE?

Thanks in advance.

Edit: BTW, Preview seems to just post if you're starting a new thread.

[Technoid]

"98 is screwed if I upgrade past my 512M of memory" where did you get that idea from ?

[SitFlyer]

Originally posted by Technoid
"98 is screwed if I upgrade past my 512M of memory" where did you get that idea from ?

It has to do with the number of memory addresses available in W98. It's a known issue. I've encountered this problem myself. When I was using my G400 Max(32MB), all was cool with 768MB, but switching to a Voodoo5(64MB), only allowed me to have 512MB of RAM in my system.

[Tempest]

Re: Moving to Win2K

How do I remove Internet Explorer, or at least stop it preloading itself at boot-time?
Don't think it is possible, until 2000lite/XPlite comes along.
Actually, how do I do that in general? (Things like the Task Scheduler come to mind.)
In Win2K, you most often tweak it by removing unnecessary services (http://www.blackviper.com/WIN2K/servicecfg.htm) or using tweakers such as Xteq X-Setup.
With Win98, I used 98lite to remove IE and a lot of other unnecessary junk. Is there anything like that for Win2K?
There are some tweaks to remove unwanted stuff, like http://www.littlewhitedog.com/forum/...sp?TOPIC_ID=71
I hear that FAT32 is faster than NTFS. Right?
Not so much that anyone would notice. Anyways, NTFS is a lot more fault-tolerant, so go for that unless you want to run DOS stuff or fear that your Win2K system will go belly-up and not even boot anymore (harddrives about to die etc).
Is there a way to turn off that annoying feature of the start menus where they only show what you've recently used until you click on the arrows at the bottom?
Yes, see http://www.microsoft.com/enable/trai...sonalmenus.htm... I think that does the trick, although I myself have disabled "Shell Enhancements" in Tweak UI.

Other comments? DON'T DRINK TEH MILK!!!! Some will definitely warn you about not going Service Pack 3 because then you will sell your soul to Microsoft. Dunno about that, I already did and I feel fine

[Technoid]

Sigh......
yep, its on the same list as win95 only supports 64MB...

[Taz]

Yes Win9x does have issues with more than 512Mb RAM as documented here, it also explains how to get around the problem.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;253912

# Deliberately installed a second processor.

Er, can you accidently install a second processor

[Technoid]

uhm, yes but it has absolutely nothing to do with memory on grafikscards!!!

[Gurm]

Re: Moving to Win2K

Originally posted by Ribbit
Well, I did a couple of things to my machine last weekend:

• Deliberately installed a second processor.
• Accidently trashed my Win98SE boot partition.

Now perhaps the second item was down to divine intervention or something, but it's made me think about switching to Win2K as my gaming OS.

Dear God WHY?

(Let me take a moment to stress this - I use Windows for games and games only. No web browsing, no email, no wordprocessing, no office stuff, no MP3 playing, just games. Everything else I do with Linux.)

Let me take a moment to stress this - Win2k is not a gaming OS.

Win2K can make use of my second processor, '98 is screwed if I upgrade past my 512M of memory, and also hardware companies are supporting win2k better than '98.

NOW you're making sense. Win98 has been discontinued. Finito. Glad SOMEONE is starting to realize that.

So my Win2K questions for the wise:
- How do I remove Internet Explorer, or at least stop it preloading itself at boot-time?

You don't.

- Actually, how do I do that in general? (Things like the Task Scheduler come to mind.)

You can turn off the task scheduling service. Lots of services are not needed for gaming. Black Viper has a great list on his site:

http://www.blkviper.com

- With Win98, I used 98lite to remove IE and a lot of other unnecessary junk. Is there anything like that for Win2K?

Nope. There was a W2kLite project, but it went away. The kernel is too tightly bound.

- I hear that FAT32 is faster than NTFS. Right?

Depends. For gaming, yes probably.

Is there a way to turn off that annoying feature of the start menus where they only show what you've recently used until you click on the arrows at the bottom?

Yes. It's called "personalized menus". TweakUI will let you disable it, as will most any tweaking tool. Additionally, I think you can turn it off directly from the taskbar properties page.

Most of my hardware is from companies who I'm pretty confident would make sure their drivers are SMP-safe (LSI, Matrox, AMD, 3Com). But I'm not so sure about the soundcard (a Hoontech Trident 4DWave). Is there a good way to stress-test the drivers for SMP-safety?

Well, that would be a false confidence. Additionally, there's a difference between SMP-safe and SMP-compliant. As far as I know, Matrox STILL does not have SMP drivers. The only company that had 100% SMP compliant drivers was 3dfx (oops!), with nVidia a close second, but I haven't seen an SMP compliant set of drivers from them for a while. ATI and Matrox both have SMP-safe drivers, but not SMP-compliant ones.

The difference, of course, is that SMP-safe means your OS can use SMP without crashing the drivers. SMP-compliant, on the other hand, means that you can actually use SMP in a game (such as Quake or Unreal) without crashing the system.

To my knowledge, there are NO SMP-compliant graphics cards on the market at the moment.

As for the sound card... run a game. If it stays running for more than 15 minutes, the card is SMP safe.

Other advice is welcomed (like "don't install Service Pack X without doing Y!!!", etc.) Or given the application (gaming), should I just stick with Win98SE?

I sounded kind of abrupt and rude up above, didn't I?

The thing is, you've asked how to use a business OS to play games. Use a gaming OS. XP was designed for faster graphics and better gaming performance and stability. Use it.

- Gurm

P.S. We know preview is broken. It's being looked into.

[Gurm]

Re: Re: Moving to Win2K

Originally posted by Tempest
I hear that FAT32 is faster than NTFS. Right?
Not so much that anyone would notice. Anyways, NTFS is a lot more fault-tolerant, so go for that unless you want to run DOS stuff or fear that your Win2K system will go belly-up and not even boot anymore (harddrives about to die etc).

For gaming, I'd use FAT32. There's no need for journaling and the other advanced features of NTFS if he's just playing games.

- Gurm

[Ribbit]

Re: Re: Moving to Win2K

Originally posted by Gurm
I sounded kind of abrupt and rude up above, didn't I?

That is your way

The thing is, you've asked how to use a business OS to play games. Use a gaming OS. XP was designed for faster graphics and better gaming performance and stability. Use it.

Fair enough, but (1) I happen to have a Win2K licence that's going unused, so why waste £170 or so on XP?, (2) I used XP for myself for the first time yesterday, and all I can say is "yuck", and (3) the activation stuff really doesn't agree with me.

[SitFlyer]

XP
2k

[Ribbit]

Re: Re: Moving to Win2K

Originally posted by Gurm
Well, that would be a false confidence. Additionally, there's a difference between SMP-safe and SMP-compliant. As far as I know, Matrox STILL does not have SMP drivers. The only company that had 100% SMP compliant drivers was 3dfx (oops!), with nVidia a close second, but I haven't seen an SMP compliant set of drivers from them for a while. ATI and Matrox both have SMP-safe drivers, but not SMP-compliant ones.

The difference, of course, is that SMP-safe means your OS can use SMP without crashing the drivers. SMP-compliant, on the other hand, means that you can actually use SMP in a game (such as Quake or Unreal) without crashing the system.

Hang on, let me get this clear:

As I understand it, there's not really such a thing as a game/program which 'uses SMP' - there are programs and games which run as two or more threads, and on an SMP OS, those threads (can) run on different processors simultaneously. Programs do not explicitly say "This runs on CPU0, this runs on CPU1", they have no knowledge about this. This is the picture I get from my Unix/Linux-centric worldview, perhaps Windows is a bit different.

So what you're saying is, if I have an SMP system with SMP-safe but not SMP-compliant drivers, I shouldn't expect to run a multithreaded game (e.g. iL-2, Falcon 4, Q3 engine-based) without risking a crash. Or is it something else, like there's only a problem if more than one thread tries to draw graphics at a time?

[Ribbit]

About IE preloading, what does LoadWC.exe do? I know it's something to do with IE, but I don't know what exactly.

Originally posted by Taz
Er, can you accidently install a second processor

I just wanted to contrast it against my accidental Win98 trashing, that way I only look like half an idiot

Originally posted by Technoid
uhm, yes but it has absolutely nothing to do with memory on grafikscards!!!

Actually if you take the AGP aperture into account I'm betting there's a connection (or an explanation for Sitflyer's story anyway).

Thanks for the Black Viper and other links, guys.

[Guru]

Originally posted by SitFlyer
XP
2k

[Ribbit]

Re: Re: Moving to Win2K

Originally posted by Tempest
Some will definitely warn you about not going Service Pack 3 because then you will sell your soul to Microsoft. Dunno about that, I already did and I feel fine

But if you turn off automatic updates or whatever it's called, it pretty much defangs the ominous EULA changes, I'm guessing. No good them saying "You allow us to do what we want with your computer! MWAHAHAHA!!!" if you turn off the feature that lets them do it...