Hi-
My dad has an Athlon (classic Slot A) system I built for him about 2 years ago. I recently had to replace his mainboard and while I was setting it up I noticed a Memory Interleaving option in the BIOS. The options are the following:
I'd like to enable this setting if it will not reduce the stability of the system in any way. My dad is using two 128MB sticks of Mushkin High-Performance Rev. 1.5 PC133. The speed is set at 100Mhz + 33Mhz = 133Mhz within the BIOS.
I hear that enabling interleaving will improve memory performance. That will be nice but my dad is in no way a power user. He probably won't notice the difference so I will only be willing to enable it if there is NO reduction in system stability. Should I enable Interleaving?
[incessant whining having nothing to do with the subject]
I have been through hell and back over the last 24 hours with this system. First the KA7 mainboard dies. I install an Athlon T-Bird with a KT133 chipset board for his use until the new Slat A board arrives. That goes smoothly and Win98SE swallowed that hardware change with no problems. I then get the new slot A board and install it. Seemed OK. Since I remembered there were some SBLive! Issues with the VIA chipsets, I decided to make use of the onboard audio on the new board instead of the SBLive! I gave my dad. That seemed to work great too. Finally, I take the system to his place and set it back up. I purposely left his Win98SE install intact because I knew he was comfortable with it. So I decided while I'm there, I might as well do WindowsUpdate. I saw that DirectX 8.1 was available so I thought I might as well get it for him (he has a cable modem). During the download, being the multitasking fool that I am, I decided to check for the latest and greatest 4in1 drivers from VIA. Sure enough, the new driver-o-the-month was out so I downloaded it and installed it while the DirectX download was still going. After the 4in1 install was complete (now the DirectX installation just started after download), in my haste, I accidentally told the 4in1 installation program it was OK to reboot. So the system rebooted during the DirectX installation. BAM! No more booting Win98, it freezes during loading up (just as the sound starts). So I go into Safe Mode and see there are multiple "ghost" hardware devices in device manager (from the previous hardware swapping, I presume). I start deleting a bunch of devices in Device Manager so that Win98 will redetect and configure them correctly on bootup. I'll be god-damned if the system BSODs every time I try to boot into anything but Safe Mode after that. GDMFPOS system! The blue screen tells me to reinstall Windows98. That's no problem but I decide I need to backup the drive before I mess with that. I’m forced to take my 15GB Fireball Plus LM with WinXP NTFS on it and FDISK and format it so I can Ghost my dad's system to it for safety. No big deal you'd guess. Well, Ghost craps out during the copy saying the destination drive is FULL. This is not possible because the destination is bigger than the source! After multiple attempts I finially go to the IBM site and download the ZAP utility to delete everything from the first 128 sectors (? I think) of the drive. Now, I FDISK and Format the drive again and the Ghost process works. Maybe FDisk doesn't work well with WinXP partitions? Or maybe I had Linux on that drive in the past, not sure. It is now safe to reinstall Win98SE. The Win98SE installer goes through the whole process and the system STILL is doing the same thing. Goddam Win98 sucks! Finally, I just say the hell with it and install WinXP. Seems to be working fine so far although I have to set-up is scanner and show him how to use it. Hopefully he will be able to get comfortable with it fast(I’m using the Windows Classic theme). He's a noob even though he has been online for two years! I really didn't want to change because he was so comfortable with how his scanner worked and stuff but I'll be goddamned if I put Win98SE back on that machine again! At least I can run F@H as a service on his machine now
I think NTFS will be a good choice for him too (stability wise).
[/incessant whining having nothing to do with the subject]
My dad has an Athlon (classic Slot A) system I built for him about 2 years ago. I recently had to replace his mainboard and while I was setting it up I noticed a Memory Interleaving option in the BIOS. The options are the following:
- Disable
- 2 Bank Interleave
- 4 Bank Interleave
I'd like to enable this setting if it will not reduce the stability of the system in any way. My dad is using two 128MB sticks of Mushkin High-Performance Rev. 1.5 PC133. The speed is set at 100Mhz + 33Mhz = 133Mhz within the BIOS.
I hear that enabling interleaving will improve memory performance. That will be nice but my dad is in no way a power user. He probably won't notice the difference so I will only be willing to enable it if there is NO reduction in system stability. Should I enable Interleaving?
[incessant whining having nothing to do with the subject]
I have been through hell and back over the last 24 hours with this system. First the KA7 mainboard dies. I install an Athlon T-Bird with a KT133 chipset board for his use until the new Slat A board arrives. That goes smoothly and Win98SE swallowed that hardware change with no problems. I then get the new slot A board and install it. Seemed OK. Since I remembered there were some SBLive! Issues with the VIA chipsets, I decided to make use of the onboard audio on the new board instead of the SBLive! I gave my dad. That seemed to work great too. Finally, I take the system to his place and set it back up. I purposely left his Win98SE install intact because I knew he was comfortable with it. So I decided while I'm there, I might as well do WindowsUpdate. I saw that DirectX 8.1 was available so I thought I might as well get it for him (he has a cable modem). During the download, being the multitasking fool that I am, I decided to check for the latest and greatest 4in1 drivers from VIA. Sure enough, the new driver-o-the-month was out so I downloaded it and installed it while the DirectX download was still going. After the 4in1 install was complete (now the DirectX installation just started after download), in my haste, I accidentally told the 4in1 installation program it was OK to reboot. So the system rebooted during the DirectX installation. BAM! No more booting Win98, it freezes during loading up (just as the sound starts). So I go into Safe Mode and see there are multiple "ghost" hardware devices in device manager (from the previous hardware swapping, I presume). I start deleting a bunch of devices in Device Manager so that Win98 will redetect and configure them correctly on bootup. I'll be god-damned if the system BSODs every time I try to boot into anything but Safe Mode after that. GDMFPOS system! The blue screen tells me to reinstall Windows98. That's no problem but I decide I need to backup the drive before I mess with that. I’m forced to take my 15GB Fireball Plus LM with WinXP NTFS on it and FDISK and format it so I can Ghost my dad's system to it for safety. No big deal you'd guess. Well, Ghost craps out during the copy saying the destination drive is FULL. This is not possible because the destination is bigger than the source! After multiple attempts I finially go to the IBM site and download the ZAP utility to delete everything from the first 128 sectors (? I think) of the drive. Now, I FDISK and Format the drive again and the Ghost process works. Maybe FDisk doesn't work well with WinXP partitions? Or maybe I had Linux on that drive in the past, not sure. It is now safe to reinstall Win98SE. The Win98SE installer goes through the whole process and the system STILL is doing the same thing. Goddam Win98 sucks! Finally, I just say the hell with it and install WinXP. Seems to be working fine so far although I have to set-up is scanner and show him how to use it. Hopefully he will be able to get comfortable with it fast(I’m using the Windows Classic theme). He's a noob even though he has been online for two years! I really didn't want to change because he was so comfortable with how his scanner worked and stuff but I'll be goddamned if I put Win98SE back on that machine again! At least I can run F@H as a service on his machine now
I think NTFS will be a good choice for him too (stability wise).[/incessant whining having nothing to do with the subject]
