M571 and Windows 2000 Pfofessional

[kyjet]

Help needed. I am using M571 with AMD K6-2 500, 128 MB RAM (planning to add another 128 mb ram) , off-board video and sound card. Currently running Win98SE.

I am considering to rebuilt my pc and install Win2k Professional. I was told that my pc could be too slow for Win2K. Anyone out there having my config and running Win2k ? Appreciate any input.

kyjet - Sydney

[brad]

That is asking a lot from a M571, but I know a half dozen or so people running w2k on M571 based systems I built for them and they are relatively happy. The most important thing is to upgrade to a modern 30 gig 7200 rpm with a 2 meg buffer before installing w2k. A WD300BB or equivalent IBM60GXP is ideal, or a similar Maxtor or seagate.

What you don't want to do is keep using a typical 5400 rpm drive with a 512 k buffer as w2k gives the disk more of a workout.

Brad

[kyjet]

Thanks a lot Brad. If that is the case, I will keep Win98SE and invest in another computer. I am thinking of an Athlon on Asus mobo.

Cheers.

[timmy]

kyjet:

I have installed W2K on 2 M571 systems recently and I'm attempting to get the information up on the M571 site as soon as possible. The additional information will cover W2K, drivers, memory above 128 MB, tweaking, and some overclocking info.

I wish it were up now, but I'm trying! I will be testing this with Office and Visio applications; right now it seems to work OK. Please check back; I will put an announcement up when I get the info on the site.

M571 Tech Support and Upgrade Page
home.directlink.net/~timmy/M571/M571.htm

[kyjet]

You are a champion, timmy.

[q9]

I have had Win2000 running on a Pentium 100. I never shut it down as it took too long to boot up. And the disk would thrash quite a lot when opening more than one application at a time.

Fun.

I have also installed it on another machine using a K6-2 333 with 128MB RAM. It is quite usable, but nothing like the P4-1600 I am using right now.

The only reason you should do it is if you need the stability. That is why I have installed it on the 333. Windows 98 crashed every 20 minutes. The joke wears thin very quickly.

[kyjet]

Thanks q9. All I wanted is stability and Win98SE don't measure up al all. Really sick of it. God only know how many times I had to reformat everything and reinstall. Real pain.

I do hope W2k is stable enaugh. I don't plan to spend anymore on my overworked pc. I have a M571 v7a with the latest flash, AMD k62 500, 128 mb ram, 2 20 gig hdd 5200 rpm, off-board video and sound card. When W98SE isn't crashed, it works pretty fast.

Sure would like to install w2k on my pc ! Any other feedback is appreciated.

[q9]

You will find Win2k is very stable. I ran it briefly on my home machine, a Thunderbird 700 with a K7V. No real problems except it didn't like my Vortex based sound card. It would randomly just drop out. Restarting would bring it back, until it would just drop off again. No problems with Creative cards, or other "standard" types that I know of. Vortex cards are just different enough not work 100% of the time. Personally I wouldn't go past one of the new creative cards if I had to buy another.

If you can load it with heaps of RAM you will find performance will be quite acceptable. We upgraded some PII-350's from 64MB to 196MB and they went a whole lot better for it. The 333 I mentioned before had only 64MB to start with and was a pain, doubling the RAM made it better. I am upgrading that particular machine to a Duron 800 in the next couple of weeks. Then the 333 gets used as a linux development platform, database server and webserver.

Well I'm an optimist.:D

[jim chase]

Just a thought, the M571 is rarely stable at the 83mhz FSB required to get 500mhz, you might try dropping it back to 75mhz FSB and 450mhz.

Jim

[kyjet]

Jim,

Mine is running at 500 for 6 months now and it's very stable. I didn't even have to jump the v-core. Guess I got lucky ! Thanks for your concern.

[gilles lussier]

I have been using an m571 with a k6-2-500 and 128 mb of sdram installed for more than a year now. I have win2k installed on it and if anything it is faster than win98 in Office apps. In games, it is a little slower than win98, but only because there is an ATI graphic card installed and ATI's win2k driver support as never been great.

[kyjet]

Gilles,

That good news to me. Do you have 5200 rpm or 7200 rpm hdd ? I am using 5200 ones. Cheers.

[sonyfier]

I've just installed windows 2000 pro on second partition of my M571 hard drive ( IBM 7200 drive). So far it's ok except for a couple of bugs to work out:
One of which is failing to shut down stops at now safe to turn off computer (no power button ATX case) :mad:
And other is failure of one of the components to do with joystick port or such to install properly. Sorry can't recall exactly what it is and I'm on via windows ME right now.

Timmy I look forward to checking those links when you get them up.
Anyone have any suggestions about the shutdown hassle I'de appreciate it. Thought I'de seen last of those problems with windows SE :mad:

BTW everthing is standard m571 onboard video and sound.

[timmy]

It seems as if the evenings are too short to get anything done!

I'm running W2K on both systems, the one with ATI video and a tricked over Soundblaster Live Value (for the overclocked PCI bus; the system's at 5.5 x 83.3 for 458 MHz) and the other is with onboard video and sound. I have 256 MB in the first one and 128 MB in the second.

Right now, I'm running tests with big Visio drawings on the first system and then hope to do some large Office docs to check out how that will run. Everything seems good so far, but you know how that goes. The second machine is used for general web browsing, email, and games. It is solid so far.

As soon as I can, I'll post this stuff, since I'm finding out some good things regarding memory choices, chipset register tweaks, and other nuts and bolts issues. I want to include some information regarding CMOS settings and board setup also.

regards,
timmy

[gilles lussier]

kyjet, I have a 7200rpm drive in mine, but one of my daugthers has an k6-2-500 m571 system running win2k pro on a 5400rpm drive, and I can't tell the difference from a 7200rpm drive. All recent drives have 2meg cache onboard and this kind of offset the performance difference between a 5400rpm and a 7200rpm drive.

sonyfier, get yourself a cheap pci based card and it will work much better than the onboard soundcard and game port, on top of that the onboard sound card is a performance hug on the pci bus.

timmy, in win2k my memory benchmarks, using Sisoft Sandra, are over 160mb/s an almost 50% increase in performance with my tweaked bios.

[sonyfier]

Originally posted by gilles lussier

sonyfier, get yourself a cheap pci based card and it will work much better than the onboard soundcard and game port, on top of that the onboard sound card is a performance hug on the pci bus.

I realise that unfortuanetly I pulled the pci soundcard recently for use in something else and spending more money on m571 at moment is not a consideration.
I don't play games at all on it so the problem with Joyport enabler is not great concern.

I found proper y2k drivers for the 8330 chipset off one of the Pc-chips sites unfortunately win2000 will NOT install them :mad:

[gilles lussier]

I tried the win2k driver on the c-media website, and never managed to get it to work properly, so I ended-up buyin a cheap pci soundcard.