Puddin' Man said:
So you've scouted popular video cards (ATI, Nvidia, etc) and found that
no W2k or XP/W2k-functioning drivers were available?
Intel is integrating GPU into CPU cores (i.e. Clarkdale), and Intel no longer
supports W2k video drivers?
This is my experience - that if you're getting *any* newly designed video
stuff, there won't be a Win2K driver (even though, in my opinion, such
a driver would be virtually identical to a WinXP driver). The drivers are for WinXP
and up. You're welcome to research this yourself to be sure. Download the graphics driver
first and check. With Intel, you could download the ZIP version, then use the 7-ZIP
program to look through the files. I look for folders with the right kind of
names, and look inside .INF files, to see mention of which OS the thing is
for. Sometimes the README.TXT tells you the details as well.
Things like LAN drivers seem to be different. For your average new Ethernet chip,
you can find drivers for a lot of OSes. There is no snobbery with LAN chips, not
like with graphics.
It was one of the reasons I bought a copy of WinXP, so I'd have at least one
OS I could continue to use for games. Since I still occasionally dual boot
to Win2K, I decided the video card I picked up, would support both. The card
I picked, is about the best I could find. (There are better cards, but
they're not in production any more. Maybe I could find a card outside
North America, but I wanted something I could get in a couple days. The one
I bought, I just happened to notice when looking on that site for
something else. That card design is at least four years old. It has
about double the performance of the AGP card it replaced, but it is
still pretty slow.)
When I make the statement above about Win2K, that doesn't take into account
any cases where someone has hacked a driver to run under Win2K. You never
know, it might be a simple thing to do. In my case, I wanted a product where
it "says on the tin", that it supports Win2K.
I keep an old PCI video card here as well, but it was so bad on the new system,
I had to pull it. It was causing all the other PCI stuff to stutter, much
worse than some other chipsets I've used. For example, the USB mouse is bridged
to the same PCI bus as that video card, and the mouse cursor would occasionally
go all over the place. The HDaudio sound also seems to be tied into that bus
as well. It would break up, if there was heavy PCI bus usage. I haven't tried
my WinTV PCI capture card yet, but I don't expect the results to be very good.
Which Intel chipset(s) are you running? Performance hit with "vanilla IDE"?
This board has an X48 and ICH9R.
If you check some benchmark articles, desktop style usage can actually
be slower with AHCI. So vanilla IDE isn't so bad after all. AHCI is better,
if there are multiple things trying to reach the disk at the same time,
and there is a queue building of outstanding disk requests. But if the
queue depth is one, like on a desktop where you're working in one program,
the non-AHCI option may be the better match. The advantage of AHCI is it
supports hot swap. The NCQ (native command queuing) of AHCI, makes more sense
in a server setup. In the case of Intel, the AHCI driver also allows
a smooth upgrade to RAID later.
Is VPC2007 still available? I tried to make some sense of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Virtual_PC
and failed. :-(
One of the developers who works on VPC2007 keeps a blog. In this example,
he has installed a copy of Win7 inside a VPC2007 session, while at the same
time, Win7 is the host OS. This shows that VPC2007 SP1 revision, works in
Windows 7.
http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2009/01/13/windows-7-on-virtual-pc-on-windows-7.aspx
Scroll to the bottom here. There is a version here, for a 32 bit host OS and
for a 64 bit host OS. Any guest OS you install, should be 32 bit as far as
I know.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...22-6EB8-4A09-A7F7-F6C7A1F000B5&displaylang=en
VPC does like to install shims, when it comes to hardware. I've noticed
a change in the behavior of the floppy drive, after VPC was installed.
And when I recently changed to the new motherboard, the networking inside
VPC stopped working. The cure is supposed to be to uninstall it and
reinstall it again, so it can install its shim setup for the new hardware.
VPC consists of "supported" OSes and "unsupported" OSes. If you install
Win2K, that is "supported". Desktop integration should be perfect. You can
copy and paste, drag and drop files and so on. Linux is not supported.
I run Linux, but need to use tricks to get files back and forth. There is
a VPC additions package for some of the commercial versions of Linux, but
I would not expect them to work with just any Linux distro you happened to try.
Once VPC2007 is installed, you start the console, then define a new OS.
If you "start" the OS, the environment has a virtual hard drive, it has
the ability to use the CDROM drive, the floppy drive, networking, and so
on. The software emulates really old hardware, so the installer for the new OS
is fooled into thinking it is running on a 10 year old motherboard.
You don't have to "install" anything either. When I insert a Linux LiveCD
on the machine, I go to the OS window that has just started to boot. From the
menu, I tell VPC2007, to "capture" the current CD in the drive. Then,
VPC2007 considers that CD, to be an item in the boot order. The Linux
CD will then start to boot. In a couple minutes, I'll be looking at a
"Ubuntu desktop".
Now, since all the software runs off the CD, you cannot very well just
rip the CD out of the drive in mid session. If you "save" the current
session, the contents of RAM are preserved. But when that OS session is
run again, you'd have to make sure the CD with the software is available.
If you do an actual install (use the install option in Ubuntu), then
the virtual hard drive file for that OS, contains the gigabytes of
software. And you no longer need to worry about whether the CD is
there, and whether it is captured or not.
That is not much of a summary to help you, but might give you some idea
how it works. VPC2007 is a software emulator, with the ability to
bridge between resources in the host OS, and the guest. When inside the
guest OS, a program writes to "sector 7368" of its virtual hard drive,
there is a single file on the host system, which contains an image
of the virtual disk. That file will have added to it, enough information to
capture the contents of the newly written "Sector 7368". The VHD
file on the host system, expands as required. There is an upper
limit to the virtual disk size, but you'll be warned about that, when you
define the OS.
The virtual environment allows you to have multiple virtual disks.
For example, I've actually set up a dual boot environment, within
the same VPC2007 guest window. I had three virtual disk images.
One disk image for each of the dual boot OSes. One disk with
user data on it. One of the OSes in that case, was Win7, and I used
the boot manager withing Win7, to select which virtual disk to boot
off of. I was testing a failure condition someone had on a real PC,
and trying to reproduce it in a virtual environment. So the emulated
world is quite capable, if you can figure out how to do stuff.
The only thing missing on my PC, is my processor doesn't
support VT-x. Apparently, VPC2007 supports real hardware
virtualization. I've been unable to test that, since the
E4700 Core2 processor doesn't support it. As a consequence,
I'm missing the "whole experience" here. I don't know what
additional features I get, if my processor supports
Vanterpool or Pacifica. The "WinXP mode" of some versions
of Windows 7, relies on hardware virtualization (I cannot use
WinXP mode from Windows 7 here, because of that). VPC2007
(which does not include an OS with it, like "WinXP mode" does),
treats VT-x as an option. I can still run VPC2007 on my
machine, but whatever VT-x buys me, is unavailable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization
(My E4700 is a "have-not" in the list here.)
http://ark.intel.com/ProductCollection.aspx?familyID=26547
ntfs is the same for W2k and XP? Thanks for mentioning this, I'd not
heard of it. Not certain I understand it fully yet.
Wikipedia makes mention of various versions of NTFS software. But they also
mention that the most recent feature improvements, are above the file system,
rather than being within the file system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntfs
"Windows Vista introduced Transactional NTFS, NTFS symbolic links,
partition shrinking and self-healing functionality though these
features owe more to additional functionality of the operating system
than the file system itself."
That article doesn't contain enough detail, as to what differences
exist between NTFS on Win2K and WinXP.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Anandtech per Google:
What happened when Google visited this site?
Of the 19 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 3 page(s)
resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user
consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2010-03-27, and the
last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2010-03-27.
Malicious software includes 3 trojan(s). Successful infection resulted in an
average of 1 new process(es) on the target machine.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
I use Anandtech every day. It's where I get warnings about stuff, like
the plan to change all the disk drives to 4K sectors.
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/anandtech.com
(I didn't even know Anandtech have downloads.)
Firefox has its own site warning feature (it gets database updates every day),
and Anandtech doesn't trigger it. Very few sites I visit, are ever stopped by
Firefox. The last one that comes to mind, was bioscentral.com, which had
been hacked and had malware on it. It was broken for some time, and it was
in the Firefox database. That site has since been fixed, and I can visit
it again.
Even legit sites can be hacked and have malware. I got malware from the msi.com.tw
motherboard manufacturer site. Asus was also hosting a nasty one day for about
five hours, before they fixed it. Fortunately, only people entering by the
main page (asus.com) got nailed, and I use bookmarks deeper in the site, so
I missed that one. The hackers did some kind of redirect using the top page,
and didn't bother messing up the whole server.
I myself drew Win32.FraudTool.AntivirusSoft and a registry entry. Mucks
about, tells you you're infected, offers their product for $.
Much Thanks,
P
"Law Without Equity Is No Law At All. It Is A Form Of Jungle Rule."
On the Asrock motherboard I had previous to my upgrade (a board that runs
a Core2 processor), I was able to install Win98. Just to prove it could be
done. Win98 only uses one core, but the Device Manager was just as clean
as the WinXP install on the same machine. On my new motherboard, I wouldn't
bother trying that, as I expect the results would be worse. The Device
Manager would likely be a mess, and I might be staring at a 640x480 res
screen in 16 colors. It is a lot harder to find PCI Express video cards
with Win98 support. There are some, but I wouldn't waste the money on them.
(They're early first generation PCI Express and are only suitable as museum
pieces.)
Paul
