Author Topic: Windows XP Service Pack 1 OUT (Read 490 times)

Animal · « **on:** September 09, 2002, 07:21:15 PM »

You can use your Windows Update thingie to download it.
I'm still halfway thru, will post impressions when I'm done.

Animal · « **Reply #1 on:** September 09, 2002, 09:03:41 PM »

Well so far so good. No crashes so far, and it feels a tad bit faster, but maybe its placebo. I'll have to run it for a few days to say if its bad.

LePaul · « **Reply #2 on:** September 10, 2002, 08:31:36 AM »

Thanks, grabbing it now.

Service Packs don't usually mess me up. Performance took a hit here after I installed VB.Net and all the associated files and updates that required.

Thanks for the heads up

Ripsnort · « **Reply #3 on:** September 10, 2002, 08:42:04 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by LePaul
Thanks, grabbing it now.

Service Packs don't usually mess me up. Performance took a hit here after I installed VB.Net and all the associated files and updates that required.

Thanks for the heads up

My boot up time (22 seconds) took a hit to 45 seconds when I installed Norton...guess thats normal?

LePaul · « **Reply #4 on:** September 10, 2002, 09:45:18 AM »

I have Norton at home too....yea, it does slow things up a bit at load. But, I've found it does more good than harm. Speeddisk and Norton WinDoctor are things I run weekly to keep the system optimized....and in System Tools, Disk Cleanup. Purge out some of those Temp files.

Ripsnort · « **Reply #5 on:** September 10, 2002, 10:17:46 AM »

Oldie but goodie here, though the actual facts of who said what are argueable....

Quote

At a computer expo(COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the
auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon". In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: "If GM had developed technology like Microsoft,we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only
five percent of the roads.

6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation"
warninglight.

7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle,
turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

10.You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.

vorticon · « **Reply #6 on:** September 10, 2002, 10:51:37 AM »

lol ripsnort

all the roads would be toll roads.

you couldent acces certain roads if your car was to old.

car makers would be driving tthere regular cars but using a different setup inside there cars one that the steering wheel didnt break after you accidently removed what looked like a loose nut buut was really one of the thousand extra parts your car needed so that all the parts would understand each other.

youd have to reinstall all your wiring every month or so because the old wiring was just t old.

Reschke · « **Reply #7 on:** September 14, 2002, 12:41:30 PM »

Tried updating WinXP Pro to SP1 and got the computer locked into a continuous reboot cycle. Only way to get out of that was to FORMAT C: and install WinME since I gave my Win98SE away to a former squaddie.

I tried all the Safe mode option and going back to last known good configurations but nothing worked. I will be holding off on updating for a while to see if the problem was hardware related. Now I can't use the 80GB NTFS partition I have.

Lephturn · « **Reply #8 on:** September 15, 2002, 03:46:28 PM »

That was not the right move....

If you really jam XP up, just boot from the XP cd and install it right over the top. It will keep all of your existing settings and programs, and fix the problems. I've done it at work a couple of times on a box that was losing it's HDD. Easy.

Reschke · « **Reply #9 on:** September 15, 2002, 08:55:35 PM »

Tried that also Lephturn but it would not go past the windows xp splash screen. Right at the time you think it would start to boot into XP you would see the video card bios screen then the bios boot screen. I went through this for over four hours trying different things to get it to work. I even replaced both of the sticks of memory and broke the system down to just video and motherboard and still came back to something I could not overcome.

Its things like this that baffle me and sometimes make me not want to mess with computers anymore.

eagl · « **Reply #10 on:** September 15, 2002, 09:53:18 PM »

Have you tried the latest motherboard bios? I couldn't get win2k to install on my old ABIT BH6 until ABIT released a new bios several months later.

You also could try a different video card, although that's a little drastic IMHO. There might be a new video card bios available as well.

Reschke · « **Reply #11 on:** September 15, 2002, 10:19:48 PM »

Yeah I updated the bios on the video card and have the lastest on the motherboard. I tried 2 new power supply's, a PCI and AGP video card aside from my GF4 Ti4400. I tried 6 different sticks of memory and two hard drives with the same image of my hard drive on them. The only consistent thing in the test/troubleshooting was the motherboard. The thing is that once I got WinME installed I had lockups due to having 512MB memory. I pulled a stick of 256MB out to see what would happen and then no lockups. So when I installed WinXP again just like last time I put the 256 back in and installed fine. I have been running benchmarks and surfing on this install for the last 7 hours with no trouble.

Well off to play NCAA 2003 on the Xbox.

Lephturn · « **Reply #12 on:** September 16, 2002, 07:49:11 AM »

IMO either one of those memory sticks is bad, or the mainboard is bad. There is certainly a hardware problem there someplace. WinME is simply more tolerant of it than XP, but if it's bad you'll still get bitten eventually. I think the problem is still there, but from the sounds of it one of your memory sticks could be the problem. WinME has no problem using 512 Megs of RAM that I'm aware of, so it sounds like that stick is bad. However, it could also be your mainboard, since many mainboards will get finnicky about which slots you put RAM in.

What brand/quality of RAM is this, what mainboard, and what slots are you putting the RAM in? Also, you said you tried different power supplies, but what brand/power level have you tried?

Reschke · « **Reply #13 on:** September 16, 2002, 11:04:28 AM »

Quote

What brand/quality of RAM is this, what mainboard, and what slots are you putting the RAM in? Also, you said you tried different power supplies, but what brand/power level have you tried? [/B]

Memory: 3 Micron PC2100 DDR 266 512MB ECC Unregistered; also I have 3 other sticks of Micron PC2100 DDR 266 256MB ECC Unregistered. Memory was put in all three slots for testing. I run the 512MB in slot 3 on the board

Motherboard: ASUS A7V266 (with latest BIOS). Today I am headed to my old workplace to "borrow" an ASUS A7V266 and an Asus A7V8X VIA 8235 KT400 (266/333/400)MHz DDR ATX for testing.

Power Supply: tested 2 Enermax 350W "AMD/Intel approved".

Right now after running the memory through several testing routines I have not had any failures. Also there have been no reboot cycles since I updated from WinME to WinXP Pro. If nothing good happens with this test session I might just go swap stuff for the following upgrade:

Asus P4B533-V P4 400M/533Hz FSB 845G chipset (DDR) ATA133,ATX

Intel P4 2.26 GHz 512 k PGA 478pin 533FSB Retail Box

Memory PC3200 184PIN 256MB DDR400 SDRAM

Sound Cards Sound Blaster Audigy X Gamer w/1394 Port

If I swap it out with what I have still under warranty I can get this above for $150.

Here is a little blurb about memory problems within WinME from Extremetech.com .

"According to the report, Microsoft support has confirmed that the problem exists and that they are currently researching a solution. The memory leak occurs when users open large programs or files in Windows ME and then later close them. By design Windows is supposed to "recover" the amount of free memory available to the system for other tasks. However, due to this leak, Windows ME never actually manages its free memory properly, thereby leaving a system unstable and highly vulnerable to freezes, crashes and "blue screens of death." The problem does not affect any other version of the operating system."

I never had a huge problem with ME until having to reinstall it this past time. I never really liked WinME because it was a huge drag but getting it for free was not something I could turn down. If I would not have gotten my copy of WinXP Pro from Microsoft by going to one of their Technet briefings I would not have bought it either.

Lephturn · « **Reply #14 on:** September 16, 2002, 12:04:23 PM »

Aha, I suspect your mainboard can't handle that much RAM properly if you fill all three slots. It's quite common not to be able to populate all three slots with double-sided DIMMS. Also, if you only put a single 512 in one slot, make sure it's Slot 0 (Or Slot 1 depending on how it's reffered to for your mobo). Dig out your mainboard manual. You might have to put 1 512 in Slot 1, and 1 in Slot 3 or something to get it to work right. I don't know much about that board, but I know there are some others here that do. Maybe they can shed some light on this subject, but I do know there are issues like this with RAM in some mainboards. It's worth checking.

BTW, with that much RAM, you should be running Win2k or XP IMO. I've had absolutely zero problems with XP Pro, and before that Win2K Pro. XP has been rock solid for me, and it will definatly handle large ammounts of RAM properly, while WinME obviously has some issues. Honestly, WinME is CRAP, stay far away from it. Your move to XP Pro is a good one, and should solve any WinME issues with large ammounts of RAM.

Also... it is possible that even a good 350 Enermax won't cut it if you have a toejamload of disks hanging off this thing. If you continue to have strange problems, that's one area to explore.