Superpuppy 3 Setup

Discussion relating to Socket 7 hardware.
Jim
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Post by Jim »

More News: You may or not be aware that the defrag program that comes w/ XP was created by "Executive Software", who are also the creators of "Diskeeper" How do I know that? Well NT4 doesn't come w/ a defrag, so I needed one for Superpuppy 1, and "MS" recommended "Diskeeper" which I got. Diskeeper 8 Professional to be exact. Installing "Diskeeper" disables the "MS" defragger; and clicking the "MS" defrag icon will result in "Diskeeper" running after it has been installed. I complained to "Executive Software" about that; and was advised that was because the "MS" defragger was a stripped down version of "Diskeeper" which they had created for "MS" and that they both used the same registry keys.

Anyway, this is to inform you that Diskeeper is a POS to be avoided. It is slow, incapable of defragging fragmented files that are behind the swap file; and worse than that, capable of screwing up your install all by itself. Some of you may, like me, have noticed that your swap file sometimes gets fragmented to the point where there are bits and pieces of it stuck all over the drive. Most defrag programs will not touch the XP swapfile, deeming it to be immovable. (Don't ask me why). Anyway, one of the options in Diskeeper is to defrag the swapfile; though they reccomend that you do a backup before attempting anything that difficult. (Again, don't ask me why, - If Partition Magic can flawlessly resize, move, merge, split, and otherwise monkey w/ paritions w/out screwing up your data, why can't the supplier of Moronpoop's own defrag proggy?)

Long and the short of it is that defragging the swap file resulted in loss of one or more files critical to the operation of Moronpoop Windopes. Only the presence of Norton System Works on "D" drive saved my install. Registry First Aid would not run. Internet Exploder would not run. etc. Norton WinDoctor did run and identified what was missing, enabling me to reinsert the missing files where they belonged. Which brings me to the next point. What is a GOOD defragger? Answer is "Perfect Disk". I downloaded a bunch of trial versions of different defrag programs, and tested them all. Perfect Disk 7, which has since been replaced by Perfect Disk 8, was by far the best of the lot. Only reason I didn't buy it was there was no way for me to set it up so as to completely automatically defrag all of my drives and the swapfile without my having to do anything further. Problem was I needed two different defrag setup arrangements, and they only offered one. Pointed that out to them, and hopefully version 8 will correct that shortcoming.
Last edited by Jim on Sun Apr 08, 2007 7:38 am, edited 1 time in total.
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
ATI 9000 aiw Radeon AGP
SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
NEC USB 2 Card
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KGB
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Post by KGB »

I don't quite understand why this is not in software? Nevertheless, I highly recommend O&O Defragment v8.5 or above. http://www.oo-software.com/home/en/products/oodefrag/ happens to be their website. A lot of features, including defraging 2 separate disks at the same time and in different formats. Can move up files and prioritize them in the sequential cluster formations, making the HDD seek times less and have it not venture too far out of the platter, so as to keep keep the connectivity output speed high.

on a side note, I truly detest partition magic. It never works in any of my systems and is prone to failure when making duplicates or partitions. Thankfully, I was experimenting with a spare hard drive, and nothing was permantly deleted.
-K6-2 550 Gigagyte GA-5AX (5.2) 1x512MB GeForce 2 Ti500 64MB
-Pentium III 933 Asus P3C-L 2x128MB GeForce 4 Ti4200 128MB DDR
-Pentium III 750 Asus P3B-F ATi Rage128 GL 32MB
-Celeron 1.2 Asus TUSI-M 2x128MB
-Pentium IV 1.5 DELL 2350 1x128MB
-Athlon 900 Asus K7M 1x256MB 2x128MB GeForce 3 64MB
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Jim
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Post by Jim »

O&O is one of the ones that I tested, (still have the trial version actually), it was only O&O Defrag 8 Pro though; also Power Defrag 3.02; also VoptXP v7.22; also Diskeeper 8 Professional; and Perfect Disk v7. Perfect Disk v7 was by far the best of the lot. Does everything any of the others can but faster and better. Incidentally Norton Speed Disk, (See NOTE), will defrag as many drives silmultaneously as you set it to.

NOTE : Norton Speed Disk is very good for 98, but sucks for XP, - [Albert the resident Hungarian programmer, mainframe operator, etc, says that moronpoop deliberately stuck something into XP to screwup the operation of Symantec software cause they wanted to push their own] - Which makes sense, cause Roger the hacker thinks Symantec is crap.

Clarification : When I said I needed two different defrag setups, I did not mean the ability to defrag two drives silmultaneously, but rather the ability to setup two different defrag schedules. I.E. Defrag "C", "D", "E", "F", & "G" daily six days a week, and defrag "H", "I", "J", "K", "L", "M", & "N" once weekly on the seventh day. Otherwise there would not be enough time to run the defrag schedule overnight. - 180 Gig AT here.

As for Partition Magic, I have version 7; and it has never given me the slightest problem. Use it routinely to setup my XP-98 dualboot. Create the XP partition first, and load XP; then when that is all done and setup; use Partition Magic to move the XP partition back on the drive and create a 98 partition in front of the XP partition.

Here is a screen shot of what my primary master drive looked like before I ran "Partition Magic v.7" to create the WIN98-SE partition.

Image

It was a three step procedure to get it to the point you will see in the second screen shot.

1) Use "Partition Magic" to create a 4055 Meg, (maximum size possible using the default cluster size), WIN98-SE partition in front of the WINXP-PRO partition.
2) Use "Partition Magic" to resize the clusters in the WIN98-SE partition from 2k to 4k.
3) Use "Partition Magic" to resize the WIN98-SE partition to 7499 Meg by giving it the remaining unallocated space on the drive.

Result was this :

Image

Done that way; and using the Boot Magic loader, XP is unaware of the existance of the 98 partition; and stays in its cage, w/out sticking it's big nose or fat a** into the 98 partition.

If "Partition Magic" can do that, (i.e. shift the whole XP partition back on the drive; first by 4055 Meg, then do it again a second time by 3444 Meg), without any problems, I fail to see why "Diskeeper" is incapable of defragging the swap file without trashing the OS install. Maybe your spare HDD was NG, KGB, though I must admit I have never tried to copy a partition w/ "Partition Magic".
Last edited by Jim on Sun Apr 08, 2007 6:44 pm, edited 5 times in total.
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
ATI 9000 aiw Radeon AGP
SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
NEC USB 2 Card
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KachiWachi
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Post by KachiWachi »

@Defrag Swap File -

1) Set swap file size to zero, reboot in safe mode, defrag, reset swap file size, done.

2) If possible, set swap file size to a fixed number and lock.

3) Keep swap file on another drive or partition where it will not be influenced by other "data".

4) Never defrag. On my Win9x setup I did it once a month. For my W2K setup, I have never done it (OS installed 7/2004).

It also depends on what you want to defrag...and why.

I see no need for daily file defragmentation.

Thanks.
Moderator - Wim's BIOS

PC #1 - DFI 586IPVG, K6-2/+ 450 (Cyrix MII 433), 128 MB EDO. BIOS patched by Jan Steunebrink.
PC #2 - Amptron PM-7900 (M520), i200 non-MMX, 128 MB EDO
PC #3 - HP8766C, PIII-667, 768 MB SDRAM
PC #4 - ASUS P3V4X, PIII-733, 256 MB SDRAM
PC #5 - Gateway 700X, P4-2.0 GHz, 768 MB PC800 RDRAM
PC #6 - COMPAQ Evo N1020v laptop, P4-2.4 GHz, 1 GB PC2700 DDR
PC #7 - Dell Dimension 4600i, P4-2.8 GHz, 512 MB PC2700 DDR
PC #8 - Acer EeePC netbook, Atom N270 @ 1.60 GHz, 1 GB RAM
PC #9 - ??? ;)
Jim
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Post by Jim »

Gives you better benchmark scores; though Roger who has somewhere upwards of 500Gig on his machine never defrags either. My landlord, on the other hand only has 23Gig on his; and his "C" drive is almost full; and if he doesn't defrag his machine gets very slow.

The reason for daily defrags, is a good defrag proggy will run much faster if there is not much fragmentation to fix. If you have a relatively slow machine w/ a lot of disk space to be defragged, it helps to run your defrag regularly so you can defrag a lot of disk space in a relatively short time.
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
ATI 9000 aiw Radeon AGP
SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
NEC USB 2 Card
User avatar
KachiWachi
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Post by KachiWachi »

It depends on what files are actually getting fragmented...and/or if they are used frequently.

Thanks.
Moderator - Wim's BIOS

PC #1 - DFI 586IPVG, K6-2/+ 450 (Cyrix MII 433), 128 MB EDO. BIOS patched by Jan Steunebrink.
PC #2 - Amptron PM-7900 (M520), i200 non-MMX, 128 MB EDO
PC #3 - HP8766C, PIII-667, 768 MB SDRAM
PC #4 - ASUS P3V4X, PIII-733, 256 MB SDRAM
PC #5 - Gateway 700X, P4-2.0 GHz, 768 MB PC800 RDRAM
PC #6 - COMPAQ Evo N1020v laptop, P4-2.4 GHz, 1 GB PC2700 DDR
PC #7 - Dell Dimension 4600i, P4-2.8 GHz, 512 MB PC2700 DDR
PC #8 - Acer EeePC netbook, Atom N270 @ 1.60 GHz, 1 GB RAM
PC #9 - ??? ;)
Jim
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Post by Jim »

Anyway Superpuppy 3's XP boot is pretty well setup now; but I still have to do the 98 side and re-import all of my own files into storage.

Personally, I think my start menu setup beats Moronpoop's by miles. Imagine what the following would look like if it had been done the Moronpoop way!

Starting from the backend, fisrt the writing related stuff :

Image

Next comes the video related stuff :

Image

After that we have Utilities. First System :

Image

Within system utilities we have a couple of examples of the sort of thing you can find if you go digging through program folders looking for executables.

Image

Click on the Adware Spyware shortcut, and we find a couple of extra items that weren't in the original program shortcuts.

Image

The first is this one :

Image

That might come in handy some day. The other one is something you can do yourself by editing the registry; but this is a lot easier. Ever been irritated by those programs that stick an icon in the taskbar so that they are running in the background all the time? To safely do an install, you have to use msconfig to shut them down; but the problem w/ some of them is whenever you use them, the icon lands on your taskbar again,- creating a duplicate entry in msconfig; - and using msconfig to shut them back down requires that you do a restart. Pain in the butt no?

Image

That little hidden jewel lets you remove the little suckers from msconfig, so they only run when you click their icon, - period!!

Next we have the disk utilities that I currently have installed :

Image

And finally in this set of pics, we have my picture editing software :

Image

I say again, imagine what that start menu would look like done the Moronpoop way!

Incidentally, the reason that CPU Cool, MSN Messenger, and K6Speed are appended to the bottom of the start menu is simply that I pulled them out of the "Startup" folder and stuck them there while I was doing installs.
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
ATI 9000 aiw Radeon AGP
SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
NEC USB 2 Card
User avatar
Uranium235
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Post by Uranium235 »

That is a very efficient way you organized your menus. I may have to adopt something similar for my rigs. :)

BTW, what I do on my dual-boot Win98SE/WinXP machines is I'll put the swapfiles for each OS on a separate partition at fixed sizes.
The native defrag software works good enough for me. First I defrag the Windows98 and XP partitions with the Windows98 defrag software, then I go back and defrag both partitions with the XP defrag software.
Jim
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Post by Jim »

Didn't know you could do that. (Run the 98 defragger on XP and the XP defragger on 98). Thought that it would screwup your install doing that. Live and learn, thanks.
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
ATI 9000 aiw Radeon AGP
SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
NEC USB 2 Card
User avatar
KachiWachi
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Post by KachiWachi »

Me either.

I assume that your disk needs to be formatted FAT/FAT32 and not NTFS to do this...correct?

Thanks.
Moderator - Wim's BIOS

PC #1 - DFI 586IPVG, K6-2/+ 450 (Cyrix MII 433), 128 MB EDO. BIOS patched by Jan Steunebrink.
PC #2 - Amptron PM-7900 (M520), i200 non-MMX, 128 MB EDO
PC #3 - HP8766C, PIII-667, 768 MB SDRAM
PC #4 - ASUS P3V4X, PIII-733, 256 MB SDRAM
PC #5 - Gateway 700X, P4-2.0 GHz, 768 MB PC800 RDRAM
PC #6 - COMPAQ Evo N1020v laptop, P4-2.4 GHz, 1 GB PC2700 DDR
PC #7 - Dell Dimension 4600i, P4-2.8 GHz, 512 MB PC2700 DDR
PC #8 - Acer EeePC netbook, Atom N270 @ 1.60 GHz, 1 GB RAM
PC #9 - ??? ;)
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Uranium235
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Post by Uranium235 »

Yes, all the partitions are formatted FAT32. Never tried the defrag trick with NTFS on the XP partition so I can't say that will work or not. My understanding is NTFS and FAT32 are incompatible but FAT16 and NTFS are compatible.
Jim
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Post by Jim »

Having enormous difficulty installing the software for my ATI 9000 aiw & "Creative"* SB Audigy MP3+ under WIN98-SE. Problem is "Creative" wants the ATI driver installed first, the ATI driver wants Windopes updated before it is installed; and updating Windopes prevents the "Creative"* drivers from loading. Have managed to get the sound card working, minus the launcher, tasktray, and soundfont features; but getting popups saying "The sound card is not properly installed. Reinstall your soundcard." If that weren't enough, The ATI "Multimedia Centre" wants the sound card installed before it is loaded; and the LG DVD burner software loading instructions insist that the Cyberlink DVD software MUST be loaded before the ATI DVD decoder.

Lovely!! Such fun!! - Gonna have to figure out which part of the "MS"** "Update" software is preventing the "Creative"* drivers from loading, then hold off on that part of "Updating" Moronpoop's crapware.

NOTE : Have found that "The Unofficial Service Pack v 2.01" is overwriting 3 files that are newer; but don't know which ones. Got that by doing a backup before installing "The Unofficial Service Pack", then after installing it, doing a Restore from backup replacing only older files. Got 3 replaced.

EDIT : On a fresh reinstall of the "Unofficial Service Pack" done at a later point in the install sequence; and again doing a restore from a new backup after the reinstall to catch any overwitten newer files; I got 30 files restored that were newer than the ones that the "Unofficial Service Pack" overwrote them with.

Recommend doing a backup before installing the "Unofficial Service Pack" to anyone using it, because its overwriting files w/ older versions does cause problems w/ some software which requires the newer versions.

*= VERY "Creative" at coming up w/ ways to FU a computer!!
**= "Moronsh_t"
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
ATI 9000 aiw Radeon AGP
SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
NEC USB 2 Card
Jim
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Post by Jim »

Latest is I now have all of the components of the sound card installed, though the card is not working. I think I can get it up and running fully and properly now just by installing the updated drivers. (It works ok on the XP side.) But now another problem has surfaced in trying to get the driver loaded on the 98 side for my Mitsumi floppy. Again it is working fine on the XP side; but every time I try to load the driver on the 98 side, windopes says that there is no information pertaining to my hardware in the folder I direct it to. Very frustrating.

The Mitsumi is a floppy w/ a couple of different USB card readers built in. The drivers are of course for the card readers. Most irritating part of it is you have to disconnect the Mitsumi's internal USB cable from the onboard mobo port before you load the drivers; then once the drivers are loaded, you reconnect the cable and the drivers are supposed to auto install when you restart. HAH!! - (I have tried every driver I could find at Mitsumi's site). For desert the onboard USB port on a DFI K6BV3+/66 just happens to be at the lower left corner of the board, and the cable passes under the rear end of all the PCI Cards, which means to disconnect or reconnect it, you have to pull out at least the sound card, and even then it is hard to disconnect.

Were that not enough, since windopes can't find its butt to wipe it, (even w/ both hands), you have to direct it to the driver manually. That in turn means you have to guess what type of hardware "MS" classes the Mitsumi as, which isn't easy. Managed to get "Mitsumi USB Card Reader Floppy Drive" or something to that effect to come up once by trial and error; but stupid me did not write down how I got there. Figured that had solved the problem; - HAH !! "MS" came back w/ "That is Plug & Play", (Prug & Pray), and the load crapped out again. Gradually they are driving me BugF-.

EDIT : More problems. Tried installing the sound card driver updates, and got an instant freeze. When I try to load the original drivers that came w/ the card, it goes up to the point where it says "New Hardware Discovered - Sound Blaster Audigy processor" then freezes there. Yet if I do a restore from my old backup, (made w/ the old SP3 1Meg cache board), the card works, though Plug & Play winds up being disabled in Device Manager, because "The system is reporting 2 different types of PCI Bus" or something to that effect.

Think I am going to have to strip down the machine leaving just the sound and video card in, at least until I get the sound card installed. That might help w/ the Mitsumi too.
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
ATI 9000 aiw Radeon AGP
SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
NEC USB 2 Card
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tazwegion
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Location: Victoria, Australia

Post by tazwegion »

Now all these details, specifics & tips are great but what get's my heart racing is the modification side of PC's, I recall on one of your previous incarnations had superb ram sink, HDD coolers and "physical motherboard enhancements" what have you done since then in regards to modifications to your Super Puppies Jim? :wink:

Can we have some eye candy to go along with all this raw data? :twisted:Now all these details, specifics & tips are great but what get's my heart racing is the modification side of PC's, I recall on one of your previous incarnations had superb ram sink, HDD coolers and "physical motherboard enhancements" what have you done since then in regards to modifications to your Super Puppies Jim? :wink:

Can we have some eye candy to go along with all this raw data? :twisted:
Image
Jim
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Post by Jim »

Superpuppy 3 is down, probably for good. Superpuppy 2 is still running, what I am mainly using these days is SCX which I posted some pictures of in the ""other systems" section. I am currently working on another machine, based on an HP case that I kinda liked the looks of. It needs extensive mods to the case to get things the way I like them. It will windup being a Gigabyte G41MT-D3 board wuith a Mitsumi floppy, (with built in card readers), a Scythe 4 Channel fan controller, (with 4 separate temp monitors attached), 3 SATA HDDs, (one of which goes in a Hot Swap Tray), Am thinking of getting Skill RAM for it and it wiull be running an unlocked 3GHz Quadcore. Have been trying unsuccessfully to find a Scythe Mine" CPU cooler for it since the case is kinda small and said Scythe gives excellent performance, (See : http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=8757), for a smaller than normal cooler; unfortunately it is a discontinued item.

Apart from that I still intend to do SCZ using the Gigabyte board that I bought from Kalabok. Should be a near record AT machine, 1.4 GHz Tualatin OCed whatever I can get out of it, with ATI 9800 Radeon AIW, 2x 120 Gig Samsung IDE Hdds and 1 60 Gig Samsung IDE HDD with one of the 120 s in a Hot Swap Tray.
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
ATI 9000 aiw Radeon AGP
SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
NEC USB 2 Card
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