Window XP Home ... wacko ...

[Pathos]

My brother just bought himself his first computer.

brand new :
AMD athalon 64 3500+
Asus A8N-SLI mother board
2*1gig ram
Western Digital 250GB Sata hard drive
XFX 7600GS (yes I know ... hes more into multimedia than gaming)
philips 170S 17Inch LCD
Microsoft keyboard + mouse (both awful but the wireless logitech kit was out of stock and he saved money)
RaidMax ninja case

he installed the latest beta version of ubuntu dapper virtually by himself in about 20 minutes (we helped him with the partitions). Hes not a computer expert but he aint an idiot and really likes linux because the first distro I showed him was vector linux which installs at least 10 graphical editors/tools/utilities and KDE is very nice to use.

Well he played around with synaptic and had some fun testing his hardware then the next day went out and bought Windows XP Home and installed it...

it took 10 hours to install itself :confused:

when he logged in it desparately tried to use every cpu cycle it could :nothappy:

oh yeah and surprise surprise it fried his ubuntu install :mad:

I wonder if windows has trouble with the sata ... perhaps it tries to access by ide and times out and then tries the sata... I can't think of any other reason for the long install...

funny how the beta "Mr hardware incompatible" linux worked out of the box...




2 secs of googling later :
http://www.cpusolutions.com/mm8004744CPU/HTML/Guides/Installing%20Windows%20XP%20on%20a%20SATA%20Harddrive.htm

lol why doesn't a brand cd of windows XP support sata properly.

grr no warnings at all...would linux warn you if it was going to trash something and that the device you were going to use was incompatible? I would think so ...

I'm surprised the motherboard manual didn't have any notes on installing XP either.

[Pathos]

we've got the drivers and the hd seems to be fine

I did some speed tests with some programs I made and my brothers 3500+ gets 800 thousand while my 2500XP+ gets over 70 million....

the processor seems to be running at 2210mhz according to tiny res meter ... this is just weird.

[mobrien_12]

Yeah... I find Windows installs to be a real bitch.  Downloading and putting all the software and drivers and stuff... not to mention the reboot reboot reboot thing.  And nobody seems to talk about how long it takes Windows XP to shut down, or the shutdown phase of the reboot, just how fast it seems to boot up.

On the other hand, Linux wireless support BLOWS.

[Lead Head]

2.2Ghz is normal, download SuperPi from http://www.xtremesystems.org/pi and run the 1M bench, tell me how long it takes.


@mobrien, yeah, When i installed win2k, i went to install the ATi Drivers wich needed .net 2.0 wich needed windows installer 3 wich needed Sevice Pack 4, about two hours just to install some damn video card drivers.

[mobrien_12]

the processor seems to be running at 2210mhz according to tiny res meter ... this is just weird.

Did you not know that AMD doesn't put clock speeds on their chips?   That chip is running at 2.2 GHz.  

What AMD puts on their chips is an estimate of  the equivalent Pentium 4 clock speed.  That's why the "+" is there.   Where they come up with such a number, I have no idea.  For all I know, they may do enormous amounts of benchmarking or they may just make it up, or somewhere in between.

[Pathos]

I know that, I'm saying that the processor is running at the correct speed yet it is only able to increment an integer 800,000 times in 3 seconds (using ~70% cpu) ????

Its as if the processor is running at 100mhz...but its not. My brother was stress testing the machine by running the gimp using special effects on an A3 sized image with 300dpi and the processor handled it fine in ubuntu.

temperature is a 40 degrees so its not overheating.

only other option is the standard clock() function is very slow ...

I'll do a test to see how it takes to increment an integer 1000000 times without doing clock() calls.

[mobrien_12]

Oh I understand now.

Is the L2 and L3 cache enabled?  CPUs are crippled w/o them.

There are some better stress tests you could do on it than incrementing an integer.  Solemnwarnings idea of calculating Pi to umpteen digits is pretty cool.

[Lead Head]

Correction, its to the Equivalent Orginal Athlon speed, A64s only have L1 and L2 cache. Another thing download SuperPi prog from the link i gave and run the 1 million digit calculation, it should get around 44seconds to calculate 1 mil digits, 40-48sec is good, over that, something is wrong

[Pathos]

The point of the test I did was to ensure that the test was so small it stayed in cache and only tested the cpu (no memory retrieval or interaction with the motherboard).

I can't be sure of that with other tests.

My best guess is that it is a cache problem ... ... or bios..

[inane]

I refuse to put Windows and GNU/Linux on the same hard drive anymore. Windows refuses to play nicely. Windows gets the slave drive and only for games. I recently used NLite to make a new XP disk, it removed 250mb and took roughly ten minutes to install.I replaced all that crap with firefox, Oo.org and a buncha of others like gimp.I also stacked the clearlooks theme in there and removed Luna... I no longer puke when I game.
:thumbup:

[mobrien_12]

Windows gets the slave drive and only for games.

I thought windows demanded the master drive?

[Orethrius]

I thought windows demanded the master drive?

 It did.  Then the Emancipation Proclamation for Digital Hardware was delivered.  

[Pathos]

...it needed a bios update...

y didn't I think of that first thing....:rolleyes:

[mobrien_12]

It did.  Then the Emancipation Proclamation for Digital Hardware was delivered.  

GROAN.

Off topic, did you know some PC idiots in California passed a law that made it illegal to sell drives or drive controllers marked "master" and "slave?"  This was several years ago... I can only assume that such a ridiculous law got struck down.

[mobrien_12]

...it needed a bios update...

y didn't I think of that first thing....:rolleyes:

So what did the bios thing do?  Did it have something to do with the caches?