Another Windows 2000 success. When I arrived home and powered up my main desktop machine, I got popping sounds instead of booting sounds. Hmmm (or thoughts to that effect, starting with F) Must be caps in the power supply I thought, so put a new one in, but the machine would still not boot. Took it all apart and couldn’t see anything burnt, no smell either. I even took the processor out so I could look closely around the CPU socket, but nothing.
Oh well, time to upgrade I guess. I had never been entirely happy with the system anyway – it was a P4 3.6GHz processor in an Intel 915 motherboard, which should have been OK, but the fan that came with the processor was very noisy and things ran hot.
So, off to Seri Centre and buy an Intel DP35DP motherboard, E8400 3GHz Core 2 Duo Processor and 4GB DDR2 Memory.Then came the fun stuff – making it all work with Windows 2000.A quick look at the Intel site shows that they don’t provide ANY drivers for W2K for the DP35DP. Luckily most of the XP drivers work fine under 2000.The only thing I couldn’t get working was the on board sound, so I bought a cheap PCI sound card and installed that.Sound isn’t too important for me, in fact I will never understand the dipshits that use a computer as a sound system.A computer is a machine to WORK with, not play with. If you want fancy sound, buy a stereo. If you want to play games, take up golf or tennis, it’s much healthier.
Anyway, I digress….
There is one pitfall when installing Windows 2000.You must disable the Core Multiplexing in the BIOS before installing.You must also set the hard drive emulation to be IDE – this seems to be default anyway.In my case, I slipstreamed the drivers onto the Windows installation disk, along with a bunch of Windows updates so that I didn’t have to spend the next week updating the updates of Windows updates.This **shouldn’t** be necessary. You should be able to load Windows normally and then install the drivers. After the initial install, perform your updates, install your application softwareand then you can enable core multiplexing. Windows MUST be updated before enabling core multiplexing!
And once again, Windows 2000 triumphs. It’s stable and responsive and has none of the infantile XP or Vista crap.