after careful consideration...

...i've come to the conclusion that my "new" computer sucks.

specs:
dell dimension 8100
p4 1.4ghz
128 rdram
37.2gb ultra ata drive
48x cd-rom
32mb ddr geforce2 gts
usr 56k voice
microsoft intellimouse explorer usb
microsoft sidewinder force feedback pro
3com 3c920 nic
sb live mp3+
hp deskjet 895cse (parallel)
umax astra 3400 usb scanner

from top of list to bottom

• pentium 4 1.4ghz
  i get 70+ frames outside, max, in tribes 2. even after disk defragmenting, it's still a slug for a new computer. next computer i buy (or build), it's amd, no questions asked. heck, i checked benchmarks for photoshop and amd beat intel easily (even after adobe released "p4 optimized" plug-ins).
• 128mb rdram
  windows me does it's part of sucking ram for itself - it hogs half of the memory right on startup. boot length hardly changed from the old pentium 166, which is about a minute.
• samsung 48x cd-rom
  this doesn't read at 48x. mp3 encoding takes about a minute and a half for a single 3:00 track. installing a game, such as tribes 2 and max payne, took a good seven minutes.
• usr 56K voice modem
  this modem is five years old, according to usr. i read an owner's manual at usr's support site, and it was copyrighted 1996. couldn't even find drivers; it's plug-n-play compatable with windows 95.
• sound blaster live! mp3+
  i like the hibernate feature windows has. it's like shutting windows down, but boots faster (since the session is saved into memory). once i installed the drivers for my sb card, i lost the hibernation feature - the drivers aren't wdm-certified. not to mention eax is practically useless.
• hp deskjet 895cse
  it was working fine, but now there isn't any two-way communication, so the computer doesn't know if there's a problem (such as out of paper). it can only spool to the printer. i've tried to fix this, but no can do.
• umax astra 3400 usb scanner
  just don't buy umax. really, really pathetic scanner software. really seems like they were made in a garage or something - they look and perform terrible!

first, i'd like to know if there are any possible solutions to any or all of the problems above.

if no solutions are found or results unsatisfactory, i may consider donating this computer to whomever i decide may have it. i'd say this is a last resort, but it could happen.

What OS are you running? Did you install it yourself or did it come pre-installed? Have you gone through the GeForce performance tweak FAQ?

Inquiring minds want to know!

I'm not techie, but it looks like you've got a RAM bottleneck. I consider 256 to the be minimum for a serious gaming system. RAM is so cheap these days it's probably a good idea to go beyond that. I got 768 on the new system I just ordered, which is probably overkill.

os listed under ram problem. installed clean.

i'd upgrade, but i don't have any money - i quit work.

edit:
yes, geforce tweaked. tribes 2 relies more on cpu power, though.

Put your scanner up on ebay. You ought to be able to get at least $50 bucks for it. You can get 128mb of SDRAM at CompUsa for about 25 bucks.

sdram? but i got rdram in this pile!

Doesn't rdram suck?

Sorry about that. I now see from your original post that you have RDRAM. RDRAM is supposedly faster than SDRAM, but it is also considerably more expensive. CompUSA has 128k of RDRAM listed at $199.88.

I would save my spare change, hit ebay with unwanted items and maybe set up a Lemonade stand to get that $200. I think Leo might be right and 256k would help things considerably.

Before anyone starts buying RDRAM, make sure that you buy the right stuff. P4 chipsets require that RDRAM be added in pairs. This is so that Intel can achieve similar performance to DDR SDRAM since the board interleves the two sticks, giving the stuff roughly twice the performance. The very best resources for RAM are Crucial and Mushkin. Crucial has a nice little search engine thingy that guides even the biggest of morons through selecting the right RAM for their system.

To the subject at hand...

Wolffie... you're not dreaming the performance suckness. P4's, as a rule, are quite a bit slower than a similarly clocked Athlon system. However, it should be decently fast (built a P4 1.7 system for a friend of mine, and it seemed pretty fast, though, still slower than my 1.2GHz Athlon). The reason for this slowness is that the P4 uses 4 computational pipelines for ripping through computations. The [current] disadvantage of this is that since the register space is still the same, each pipeline is smaller than that used by the P3 or the Athlon. Since most code out there (like 99%) is written for 2 pipelines, the P4 takes longer to do the same work. Also, they took the flipping function out of the P4, so any computations that require XORs take twice as long. In theory, the P4 will start to be faster when code is written with SSE2 extensions and support for the increased number of pipelines, but I don't see this happening soon. BTW, I'm doing this from memory. The concepts are valid, but I might not have the numbers right, so don't beat me up...

The OS occupying a lot of RAM, is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. A lot of the RAM is being used for things like file system cache, which helps to speed things up. I would recommend a memory upgrade, though, when you've got a chance. Refer to above notes about RDRAM.

CD ROM's have that MAX thing which means that if all is well and right in the universe and you are reading the inside tracks of the CD, that you might get this data rate. Digital Audio Encoding (DAE) is another speed setting entirely, but you should have some control over how fast it goes in the software. I use Audiograbber for this kind of stuff, and I've never had a problem. It should be noted, however, that slower speeds increase the chances of having a flawless rip. Any minor defect in the CD will be exposed at high DAE rates.

USR modems are good stuff. They were even better before 3Com broke them. They haven't improved modem technology that much in the past few years, so if you've got 56K, you're doing well... Unless the thing is a Winmodem... in that case, throw the thing far, far away and buy a new modem.

Creative Labs sucks. I will never buy another CL product ever. If you get some dough for upgrades, buy a Hercules Game Theatre XP. This will allow you to move to Windows 2000/XP since the driver support is vastly superior (I don't know how ANYONE runs a Live! under Windows 2000...).

Check to be sure that your Parallel Port is setup to work in "ECP" mode. Also, be sure that your printer cable is IEEE 1284 compliant.

Sorry, I know exactly squat about scanners...

HTH.

I can pick up where Zorro left off on the scanners, and my advice regarding Umax scanners is the same as Zorro's advice regarding Winmodems: throw them far, far away, and then set fire to the landfill where it's buried. Determined to save money, my department ordered some Umax scanners for our labs and classroom a year or two ago. The things haven't worked correctly yet for more than a week or two at a time. Windows 95, Windows 98, MacOS....it's made no difference. The damn things keep breaking no matter where we put them. Oh, we can usually get them working again...until the next time someone decides to use them. And they really do look like someone put them together in a garage...it's just too bad someone in my department sometimes has trouble with the concept of a sunk cost, and just won't replace these things.

i heard tribes 2 was sse2 optimized, but i've yet to see it.

i understand how ram works. the old p166 had a 64mb edo ram chip in the motherboard without a partner, thus it wasn't detected. oddly enough, the computer seemed to run... faster!

my xing audiocatalyst usually encodes at about 7.5x speeds. i observed during my mp3 encodes today that tracks with longer length (5:00 or more) seemed to encode at 8x speed. i'm figuring the drivers slow speeds down to prevent over-encoding... only problem there is when i insert a enhanced music cd.

the modem is usr only, as far i know. i haven't seen drivers for it on 3com's site (or a modem for that matter). my connection just seems to bad then. without a custom init code, the modem connects at 45.3 bps. would be nice to bump up the speed on this thing, so i can have a decent ping when playing games. i just got done playing on a local counter-strike server and my ping averaged 200-250.

i'm starting to agree that creative sucks. remember when they actually were good, back in the voodoo2 days? they even threw in an overclocker in their driver set.

double-check on the printer stuff. still no workie though. i think i'll donate this one to my high school. :)

luckily for me, the scanner was free with the system! :D my max payne picture below was scanned with my crap-max.

You might want to check this tweak guide for WinMe:

http://www.computerjohn.com/johns_co...e/tweaking.htm

Perhaps you can squeeze some more frames out of T2.

What are your min/max Virtual memory settings set at?

i'll check out that guide. thanks for the heads-up.

i let windows me do the virtual memory management.