A couple questions for the computer literati. Please respond off list.
Well it looks like I'm going to have to make this old relic of a
computer last a few more months. My wife calls it the caveman computer.
Anyway, I would like to keep it functional without spending money for
stuff that couldn't be moved to a new box later. I just added a cheap
USB2/Firewire card to replace the rudimentary on-board USB which only
barely supported the printer. Now I can use a card reader and my
graphics tablet, yahoo! So far so good.
Problem 1: I finally gave up fighting my video card which just didn't
get along with the VIA chipset I think. So I'm back to an older card for
now and in the market for a new card that I can use now and move to a
new board when I get one. I'm looking at an ATI Radeon but overwhelmed
by the choices. I'm open to all recommendation, min 128mb, +/-$100?? My
current board Tyan 1590S has an AGP slot but is only 1x or 2x so new
card must be backwards compatible.
Problem 2: I have a new 80gb hard drive but my bios only supports up
to 36gb after I flash to most current. I was thinking of getting a
Promise ATA133 PCI card $30 to get me by rather than a software klutz.
On board is only ultra/dma/33 and so the PCI bus at least no worse. Is
this a good idea? Will this let me run more than the current max of 4 on
the IDE controller? Does this card require an IRQ? Which leads to the
next question.
Question 3: Not a problem... yet. Lack of IRQ resources. I finally gave
up my ISA modem and SCSI cards but still have an old sound card and tape
controller plus needed LPT and COM ports hogging resources. After
installing the "new" video card and USB/Firewire controller W98 insisted
on installing everything (12 items) on IRQ 10 including the video and
scsi while IRQ9 is free. Everything seems to coexist but will this cause
problems when using say the scsi scanners and a video intensive app like
photoshop? What happens if I add the hd controller to the mix?
Thanks in advance. I'd be happy to supply more info if I knew what
would be pertinent.
Mike
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