My new Athalon XP 1800 upgrade

[schenkerguy]

Hi everyone, just upgraded from an old P-166 with 32 meg of ram, to an Athalon 1800XP with 512! Yes, before the P-166 I used a 386... I like to get the most out of a machine before an upgrade ;- ) This is the first time I assembled a computer by myself, and I'm quite happy with it so far.

The mobo is an ECS K7S5A, with SIS 735 chipset, I put in 512 meg of DDR Ram, a new 64 meg vid card and my old Echo Mia soundcard, and old cd drives and 15 gig Maxtor drive.

Good things: It's very fast, especially compared to the 166 of course. With the old system I could barely turn on a vst-i without crashing, and had to use a lot of work-arounds. But now on my newest tune I've got: 2 Vst instruments, two guitar tracks recorded dry and playing through Amplitube in real time, Autotune running as an insert, 2 instances or Waves Renaissance compressor, a delay, chorus and reverb, with 3 audio tracks. With all this my cpu meter is sitting around 20%! I can play my guitar through Cubase monitoring through Amplitube or Warp VST and the delay is almost inaudible, I can't really even detect any latency playing the vst-i's. On my old system I was working with 371 ms! People here are probably going "yah, so?" but this is a huge jump for me!

Problems: Trying to install everything in Windows XP! First the install cd that came with the motherboard just said "motherboard not support" when I inserted it. When I tried to install the Echo software for the soundcard, I got "install wizard configuration error". After installing Cubase I got "can't find blah blah.dll". XP looked cool, but after nothing installing or working right, I gave up and wiped the drive, and started over with Win 98. Everything worked perfectly fine thereafter. I'm using Cubase SX, Cool Edit Pro 2, and T-Racks mainly.

I'll post my latest tune in the MP3 clinic when it's mixed.

TAFN! - G

 

[Evildick]

Have you already updated WinXp from the MS windows update site? That usually took care of quite a few errors.

Download the most recent drivers off the internet for your hardware. I've noticed that when XP says something isn't supported, it usually just means that it hasn't passed or been submitted to Micro$ofts driver testing although it works just fine.

Sis may have updated MB drivers on their website.

 

[RWhite]

Hunt through this forum back a few months. You''ll find my lengthy thread about my XP upgrade from Hell, the star of which was that very same ECS motherboard.

After 2 motherboards, a smoked hard drive, and several hand fulls of hair torn from my scalp, I gave up on making that mb ever work with XP. I hope you have better luck.

 

[sessionselect]

Did you format your hard drive before you installed XP? If so i'd recommend doing it in NTFS instead of FAT32. I threw in an old HD from my old computer to use it as a mirrored system drive and formated to NTFS and it works fine.