Games slow after upgrade to Win2k from 98SE

System breakdown:

AMD Athlon 1.3GHz
Asus A7V with Promise ATA100 controller
ATI Radeon VE AGP
SoundBlaster Live Platinum
[latest drivers for all of the above, and SP3 for Win2k]

3D performance on games has been dramatically reduced after I upgraded from Win98SE to Windows 2000. Examples are Soldier of Fortune II (OpenGL) and MS Flight Simulator 2000 (Direct3D). I've downloaded all the latest drivers. I'm not sure what to do next. The performance was much better in Windows 98SE. Any ideas?

Also, right after bootup is complete, the system is at an almost grinding halt for about a minute. After this time period the system in general runs fine. Could this be connected?

For all interested, I found a solution to this problem. I had downloaded the latest ATI driver a few weeks ago, so I thought. ATI released a newer Radeon driver recently (9/12/02), after I previously downloaded the drivers I was using. I downloaded this driver, version 5.13.01.6166, and it fixed all of the speed problems in games.

In fact, I am now able to run Soldier of Fortune II and MS Flight Sim 2002 at significantly higher resolutions and at higher detail settings than I could in Windows 98SE. I'm running MS Flight Sim 2002 1024x768 with details turned up fairly high on most settings with smooth framerates, which is something that could never be done before.

I downloaded the driver from ATI's web site, but here are some links to help others in finding beta drivers, in case version 5.13.01.6166 doesn't help them:

http://www.guru3d.com/files/ati/
http://www.3dchipset.com/drivers/b [...] ndex.shtml

And for others questioning the speed of Windows 2000 for gaming, I can say that in comparison to Windows 98SE it is a huge improvement! Just be sure you're using the best driver for your video card, because as I found out it makes a huge difference.

Hope this helps..