ATA 100 & DVD

[Guest]

System specs
K6-2 450
ASUS P5A-B 1010 BIOS
128MB SDRAM 100MHz
SBLive! X-Gamer
40gig Maxtor ATA 100 drive/ 7200rpm
Liteon 32x OEM CD ROM
RealTek 10/100Mps NIC
TNT2 Ultra 32MB (5.33 reference drivers for ME/ 6.62 WHQL reference for
Win2K)
Win ME/2000 dual boot
230W Power supply

I am about to upgrade to a Promise ATA 100 controller card and a Pioneer 16x DVD ROM. Are there any known compatibilities with this new hardware and my current configuration? Had anyone had any problems with this new hard ware? Are there any other upgrades I should make (more RAM) on this ancient Socket 7 motherboard? Thanks in advance.

 

[peteb]

Observations,

128Mb too low - get yourself 256Mb.

Promise cards seems good (I was recently using a 66ATA card happily.) were you planning to have the DVD drive on the promise controller or on the mobo IDE?

As a rule, leave like with like on IDE channels - don't put your UDAM5 HDD on the same channel as your UDMA2 DVD-ROM - it is likely to give you at the best perfomance degredation and at worst system instability.

Of course lots of systems do mix and match with no apparent affect. Good luck to you if that's the case. IDE was designed as a cheap, fast i/o standard - so it won't work like that for all people, me for sure.

-Your Comany Names Could Be Here-
e-mail for application details.

 

[Guest]

Nope I was going to have the drives on separate channels.
I was planning on buying an extra 128Mb of RAM because of the low prices, yet I heard that in a Windows environment
which I'm primarily in, there was little effect in speed.
Thank you for all your thoughts.

 

[peteb]

Well, I have no experience of ME, but my experience of 2k will mean that yes, it will load and sit there happily with 128K. You'll be able to surf and word process fine - but if you are looking to do any imaging (digital camera pics?) or gaming I think you'll find you come up short.

I would advise upgrading to 256Mb, but no further. Save your next memory upgrade for when you go to DDR with an Athlon or something!

Happy computing,

Pete.

I have found Windows to report around 80MB of memory usage with nothing running, straight from boot... Add a few system apps (CD Detector, Virus Scanner, Firewall etc.) and you'll soon find your hard disk chattering away merrily to itself...

If you plan on using your machine for much beyond door stop functions, the memory will help you greatly.

-Your Comany Names Could Be Here-
e-mail for application details.

 

[kal326]

Im sitting at 121 megs used under win2k with One IE window open, winamp playing. norton antivirus and Creative AudioHQ in the tray. I think I like having my 256 megs, more would only be good for a server or a workstation with many cad or photo programs open at once. Also my hard drive remains quite quite most of the time. I dont like it talking to itself. Its not good for its mental health! :lol:

A mime is a great this to waste! :lol: