From: Stuart F. Biggar (Stuart.Biggar_at_opt-sci.arizona.edu)
Date: Thu Apr 11 2002 - 08:49:36 EDT
At 07:54 AM 4/11/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>stevec50_at_yahoo.com wrote:
>
>>Frequent crashes like that are a commom problem with
>>Win2000 and also XP. They don't like lots of different
>>kinds of video and sound cards and some motherboards,
>>leading to frequent crashes. It especially doesn't
>>like ATI video controller chips. In a desktop machine
>>you could change the cards, possibly put in an nvidia
>>card or new motherboard but that's not possible in a
>>laptop so you should go back to Windows 98SE or ME
>>which work good too.
>
>To say that Windows 2000 crashes frequently is simply inaccurate. I've
>been using Win2000 since early betas in many different
>laptop/desktop/server environments and have consulted for many companies
>that have deployed Win2000. This is probably the most stable and
>well-constructed OS that Microsoft has ever built. It has a reputation
>for stability. If Win2000 is experiencing crashes on a particular system
>you can be sure that there is an unusual hardware or driver problem
>causing it. You may have personally experienced hardware issues, but to
>call them frequent when referring to the Win2000 installed base as a whole
>is not accurate.
>
>No, I don't work for MS, nor do I really like them much, but Windows 2000
>is a stable product that seemed like it was getting unfairly jabbed here.
>
>Rob
My experience is that Win2000 is better, in general, than older windows
versions.
However, if a driver has problems, then Win2000 will crash. For example, I
have
a VERY OLD DOS app that uses some funky old graphics modes. It runs on my A21p
(IBM preload Win2000 to which I have added service packs and the latest IBM
drivers including video). However, on exit the A21p crashes hard (won't answer
a ping over ethernet, will not respond to the keyboard, etc). I have to use
the hold the power button down until the machine resets method to regain
control.
The same old dos app runs fine on an IBM 770E running Win2000 with SP2 and all
the up to date drivers from IBM for the 770E. The old DOS program exits fine
and Win2000 continues to run. Same dos app runs fine under Win NT 4 (SP6a) on
the 770E and older TPs running NT 4. Of course the older TPs have a Trident
video chipsets instead of the ATI if I remember correctly. The older TPs are
configured for max color depth at the LCD native resolution. Of course the
old DOS app runs fine in PC DOS 7 on the older TPs. I haven't gone through
the effort of setting up triple boot (DOS/Win/UNIX) on the A21p so I don't know
if the VGA emulation of the ATI is correct in DOS.
So I think IBM (ATI) has some sort of problem with their video driver for the
A21p running Win2000, at least when it is configured at 1600x1200 true color.
I have also had problems when running some things like X server software on
Windows for doing remote display of apps running on UNIX machines. Again I
think that software triggers bugs in the Win2000 video driver for the A21p.
Same software works fine on the 770E without the hard lockups.
Stuart
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