what should I do with this P4

If you want to use your computer for gaming, ME or 2000 will both do fine. 2000 is incompatible with a few games, but I haven't had many problems with it for gaming. If you want to save a few bucks, grab the 256mb ram and Windows ME. Keep in mind you are sacrificing stability by going the ME route as opposed to the 2000 route. 256mb ram is fine for 2000 unless you're using high memory programs such as things to do with graphic or sound editing. The average user doesn't need 512mb of ram, but you'll notice the difference. I'd go with 2000 and 256mb ram, or 512mb if you require it.

--
Intel inside, AMD outside.

forget ME, either get 2000 pro, or 98 SE. Also, get the 512 in two 256 meg chips, or you have lots of problems.

Aklein

It's July. O the Joy of Summer!

So i can't get 4 128mb of ram? I'm not sure if the vendor allows for 256 in each slot. Does it make that big of a difference?

in the case of the P4.....yes..
has to be done in pairs.....its better to get 2 bigger dimsm than 4 smaller dimms.......mainly for upgradeability later on the road...

-MeTaL RoCkEr
My <font color=red> Z28 </font color=red> can take your <font color=blue> P4 </font color=blue> off the line!

haha you got pentium 4, your gonna pay out the rear for ram.
But I have to agree with one of the previous replys, go either 200 or 98se. Millenium has a LOT of problems, why do you think they are releaseing XP so soon? its so microsoft can cover their butts.
I heard a rumor that within 3 months of release of windows ME there were 300,000 differen't bugs and problems or something close to that number. Which is WAY more than has ever EVER been found in windows 98. Not to mention 98 supports almost every now.

ME runs great on my P4's @ home, maybe its not so great for AMD based systems.

Both are extreamly stable.

If you plan to play games go with Windows ME.

Unless, of course, you want to play 16bit DOS games. Then you're screwed with ME.

<pre><font color=orange>Sunnova</font color=orange> <font color=blue>Beach</font color=blue>, <i>ain't life a beach?</i></pre><p>

I can't think of any features in ME that you would need over windows 98se, it basically looks a tiny bit better but thats about it. A lot of people say that ME is basically Windows 98 third edition because its practically the same as earlier windows. There were a few minor differences between windows 98 and 98se, and there are only a few differences between 98se and ME. But me has WAY more bugs

You sound like you have tons of money since you bought a P4. I'd go 256 PC800 dual channel - thats two 256MB of pc800.. look it up thats about 300 bucks right there.. i could be wrong cos i'm guessing... and then get windows2000. It should be fine since you have an intel based motherboard right? Stay away from ME! I had it on my Intel P3 800 laptop and during school ME all of a sudden just crashed on me. Everytime i go to open a program it crashes. I couldn't put up with that so i got a "legal" copy of windows 2000 Pro and i love it! Never crashes ever! If a program crashes windows 2000 tells you that it crashed and you just end it. no bigggy.. win2k is strong as a bull! and when XP comes out, get XP pro! stay away from the mainstream home user version.

as far as ME crashing it's probably incompatible with anything other than an intel chipset. SO it has nothing to do with AMD, mostly the chipset... once nforce comes out you'll realise the true potential of the AMD and the true potential of the P4 once it uses DDR instead of the dreaded RDRAM which sucks every buck out of your wallet!

My sig is better then your's!

oh ya you could also get windows 98SE too. Since your just doing gaming... my laptop is for work so... win98se might work better for you since it is almost bug free and any game will work correctly.

My sig is better then your's!

This is what I understand about Win98, Win98SE, and WinME:

Win98 was the merging of IE and Win95B. It was reasonably good, but still quite buggy as most first versions of software are. (At least in this day and age where software testing seems to consist only of it the splash screen looks cool enough.)

Win98SE was Win98 with a lot of bug fixes, so that it crashed a lot less often and recovered from IE crashes a lot better. (Before if IE crashed in 98, you were royally screwed, and now in 98SE if IE crashed you were just kind of screwed.)

WinME was Win98SE with a wicked twist. All 16-bit code was removed. This is why there is no more DOS mode in ME, because DOS is strictly 16-bit. Of course, a LOT of software for Windows is still at least partially 16-bit, especially drivers.

What does this mean, that a LOT of drivers in WinME are unstable. And because a lot of the OS was re-written, ME is inherantly slightly buggy of it's own accord as well.

Ultimately, WinME is nothing more than Win98SE with the 16-bit code stripped out and with a few 'new' features that you can download for free from MS anyway, such as the new Windows Media Player revision.

So 99.99% of the people in the world are better off using Win98SE than WinME.

But, of course, Microsoft would say otherwise because they got rid of that 'nasty' 16-bit legacy code for you.

---

And, as a special added bonus, Win2000, what it is and isn't:
Windows 2000 is Windows NT 5. Why the different name? Because Microsoft was hoping beyond all hope that home users would go to 2000 and they could drop the Win9x support entirely. This is because the NT kernel does have many advantages over the 9x kernel, most of which though are things like communication protocols that most computer users wouldn't have a clue about, but would allow for considerably more useful software.

Windows2000 is more than just NT though. It's NT and 9x combined. As such it can run any software written for 9x or NT. In theory. The flaw with this though is two fold:

1) Win2000 uses NT type drivers. A good number of products like video cameras don't support NT at all, and a large number of companies seem to have difficulty writing stable NT drivers because they have so few NT customers and thus put all of their resources into the 9x drivers. This means that Win2000 won't run some hardware, and on occasion may be unstable because some cheap-arsed company wrote bad drivers for their hardware. (Such as VIA.)

2) Microsoft actually did quite a few things to improve the performance of the Win2000 kernel/API over NT and 9x. Such examples are when memory is freed, that freed memory is the first to be selected for use again because quite often it will be physically closer to the other memory that the program that requested the memory us using. Where as in Win9x, it just grabs the next bit of memory at the end of the memory and only re-uses memory when it finally runs out of memory at the end to grab, often putting a considerable physical difference between the pieces of memory software has reserved.

While this sounds very good to do things like this because it improved performance, many lazy software engineers did things like free memory and then continue using it anyway. In Win9x this usually didn't matter because that memory wouldn't be over-written until the system ran out of new memory to allocate. In Win2000 however, it makes this freed memory to be used right away and gets overwritten quickly, thus revealing the bugs that the lazy programmers left in their code by continuing to use memory after they freed it.

So, a lot of poorly written code will run under Win9x with stability still, while under Win2000 it will often crash. This is not because Windows2000 is buggy, but because the software being run is buggy. But everyone likes to blame the OS, not their precious game.

Okay. Now that I see you've all nodded off and fallen to sleep, I'll start to rant on ... hey, what's that cane thing? Hey!!!! I still have more to say.... [gurgle] [choke]

<pre><font color=orange>Sunnova</font color=orange> <font color=blue>Beach</font color=blue>, <i>ain't life a beach?</i></pre><p>

[runs back to the podeum]

In conclusion, Windows 2000 is a considerably more stable and powerful OS than Win98SE. However, it gets a bad reputation because a lot of software engineers are lazy SoB's who don't test their software first and don't fix their bugs fast enough if ever, and Windows 2000 gets the blame for their bad code.

[runs from the person trying to haul him back off of the stage with the giant hook]

<pre><font color=orange>Sunnova</font color=orange> <font color=blue>Beach</font color=blue>, <i>ain't life a beach?</i></pre><p>

Great job, really great. One of the best explanations/arguments I've seen on these boards.

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Whoever thinks up a good sig for me gets a prize :wink:

Hmmmmm, I have a VIA KT133a board, AMD overclocked T-Bird (@1.46 currently) WinMe/W2K duel boot. WinMe is very very stable, once again WinMe is stable on my setup. So is W2K. I havn't seen a blue screen in WinMe in over 3 months and that is playing alot of games in WinMe. WinMe hasn't locked up in anything for at least 2-3 months. I really believe it is a combination of very good ram (Crucial), high quality mobo (IWILL KK266, IWILL will probably get my money in the future), good drivers (Radeon WinMe drivers are excellent to outstanding.) Good power supply, 400w LeadMan PowMax 5100D. If any part of your setup is weak then expect some crashes.

<b><font color=blue>1.5</b></font color=blue> T-Bird
<b><font color=red>2.1</b></font color=red> P4 Speed

Shoot if I where to rate VIA on my setup I would have to say that VIA makes the best chipsets in the world!!!  

Except I do have an Abit KA7 (VIA KX133) rig, overclocked Athlon clasic 700@800, generic 300w P/S, generic PC133 cas3 ram, cheap MX400 and yes WinMe crashes periodically as well as SuSe7.2. Still learning SuSe7.2. So is it the operating system or the hardware in the second case. I believe it is the hardware.

<b><font color=blue>1.5</b></font color=blue> T-Bird
<b><font color=red>2.1</b></font color=red> P4 Speed

Thanks for all the great answers guys. But i'm still somewhat confused. I mean for a game machine should i lean toward win2000 or mill? I understand win2000 is probably more stable, But i'm thinking about gaming now and toward the future.

Don't worry about old games, don't plan on running them just looking forward. I kind of want to wait for XP but i'm getting the computer like next week.

Go for win2000. Most likely, you are only looking to the future, and most new games should be written for win2000. Don't be confused DO NOT GET WINDOWS ME. If you really want 9x, get Windows 98 Second Edition. It is cheap, and I am sure one of your friends has a copy so you can "test" it out before you purchase.
deez

if your going for gaming, then get 98se. windows 2000 has refresh rate problems and will limit your FPS to 60 in most cases.
If you have a nice video card you'll want to get as many FPS as possible, because really FPS is only an average so the higher your average the better.

I wouldn't say in MOST cases. Out of the about 15 people I know that use W2k for gaming, not a single one has had a problem with limited FPS.

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Whoever thinks up a good sig for me gets a prize :wink:

A co-worker of mine had a terrible experience upgrading a 440BX-based system from Win98SE to WinME. The upgraded system blue-screened constantly. Most of the problems went away in later revs of the nVidia drivers, but he still went back to win98 for performance reasons.

Kelledin

"/join #hackerz. See the Web. DoS interesting people."

What are you talking about? If you don't know jack about something don't talk about it. ME does NOT have all 16-bit code stipped out of it. In fact it doesn't have any 16-bit code stripped out of it. All they did is restict access to DOS. Big whip. Who doesn't have a boot disk? And where in the hell do you get the idea that ME is only for .01% of people? I built systems daily and I can tell you that ME works GREAT unless you try to upgrade over the top of anything else. Of course the upgrade sucks! Who would be dumb enough to do it anyway? ME is MUCH more stable the any other 9x version of windows. I guess my signature is just a little late for you.

Please do not pee in the gene pool!

Hmm...out of myself and 3 friends (with wildly different configurations, except all AMD), ME was horrible. Crashes, not waking up from sleep mode, etc. All of us did a full install too.
Before you flame, figure out what other people are experiencing, not just yourself.

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Whoever thinks up a good sig for me gets a prize :wink:

You should wait if you can, and get windows XP. I'm using the RC1 version, and it is great. It has the stability of Win2k and the compatibility of Win98. I have lots of old games, and I have had no problem playing them with XP. This release is more stable than any previous version, and comes with lots of nice features and new software that makes playing games nice. So my advice is, if you can - wait till October


Oh, and there should be lots of nice deals on new computers when XP comes out
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by twkatadin on 07/26/01 03:16 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

get win2k.
highly recommended.
i never realised how dumb i was putting up with random crashes of win98 till i got 2k.

even when i was first using it and had new comp/new operating system difficulties there was never a truly random lockup. all the lockups i experienced were very reproducable and thus solvable.


"i love the smell of Overclocking in the morning!" Says my Hamster.

Go with Win 2K. Win ME is a dead end, the last of the line for DOS/Win 3.1/Win 95/Win 98. Everything from here on out will be based on the NT kernel. I think you'll be a lot happier with Win 2K. If you can wait, wait for XP, but if you can't then go for Win 2K.

<i>Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.</i>

A little harsh, but you're right. Win ME still has all the old 16-bit DOS underpinnings that make it a lot less stable than the Win NT-based versions. I tried ME briefly, but went back to 98SE due to it crashing more. I can hang with 98 until XP comes out. I tried Win 2K and everything was fine, except for my ATI TV Wonder. It just would not work right for long with Win 2K. I think ATI still has only beta drivers for it for Win 2K. Jerks.

<i>Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.</i>

My winME hasnt locked up either in about that time. (unless I was testing extreme overclocks). Its all a matter of proper driver instilation and the proper tweaks to achieve stability.

~Matisaro~
"Friends don't let friends buy Pentiums"
~Tbird1.3@1.55~

I tried windows me on a p4 1.7 and hated it, go for the win 2000. I'm pretty happy with 256rdram, very rare that i use all of it. Win me plain sucks, it ran like crap on my pII 350 440bx also. There is a learning curve with win2000 but its worth it, no more BSOD!