I’m soooo tired. Like the obsessive soul that I am, I have pretty much spent all weekend trying to configure this damned thing.
It’s a Dell OptiPlex GX110, 733 MHz PIII, 256 MB, 10 GB and 6 GB HDDs. 16 MB PCI nVidia graphics card, Soundblaster Live! PCI sound card and PCI Firewire card added.
So far I’ve gotten it working OK. What I have is Windows 98 on a 5.5 GB partition (10 GB disk partitioned into 5.5 and 4.5 GBs). XP is on a secondary 6 GB disk. 98 is on the C drive. I had to load it first (as one does with a dual boot of XP and 98) and it took C.
But now Windows XP is slower than it was before. It was on the original 10 GB drive before, but then I did the dual boot thing, it ended up on the 6 GB drive. Could the reason that XP is slower now because the 6 GB is possibly slower? I don’t know how fast the 10 GB drive is, but the 6 GB drive is 5400. Could that make a difference?
And the other thing: Firewire. I also had a firewire card added, so I could run an external CDRW drive and also hook up to an external Firewire HD. The HD works fine (on XP anyway) but I can’t get much luck out of the two CDRW Firewire drives I have. One is a QPS Que!Fire, and I can’t get the website for QPS to download drivers. Sony’s site has no drivers for XP, and 98’s drivers won’t work.
Oh, another interesting thing: XP can see both drives (the two partitions on C and its own drive, obviously) but 98 only sees the C drive. And I formatted all drives (including the one that XP is on) with FAT32. I thought I would see the other drive in 98 if I partitioned it FAT32. Was I incorrect?
So yes, I guess I’m rambling now, but this damned thing has worn me out.
I guess I want to know if I can get any help getting one of the CDRW drives to work, and also, why is XP slower now? It’s not unbearably slower, but defintely slower than it was before. Windows 98 is sprightly and has a spring in its step compared to XP.
Whew! Well, anyway, any answers to these deep and probing questions would be appreciated!