Adventures in PC Ownership

In March, 1999, I placed an order with Dell for a new computer.  This article describes various problems I encountered with the machine, most of which were the result of a Windows 2000 upgrade some months later.  Table 1 shows the dates of a few key events, along with the machine's basic specifications.

Table 1

I was essentially pleased with the machine on receipt, especially its 21-inch Trinitron monitor, which I set up as a television.  In one respect, Dell shipped me a machine that didn't make sense, since a hardware DVD decoder is only necessary on systems in the sub-300-MHz range.  On the other hand, having an S-video-out jack available made some fun experiences possible down the road, when I moved in with a roommate.  (Check out Oliver Stone's movie about the JFK trial on DVD.)  The system ran Half-life well & I enjoyed listening to movies in stereo.

Cinematic bliss quickly came to an end after the Windows 2000 upgrade.  When Windows 2000 came out back in 2000, a Win2K driver for the Ravisent decoder was still years away; so the only way to watch movies was to boot back to Windows 98.  To solve this, I abandoned hardware decoding & bought PowerDVD for $50 over the Internet. I never regretted the expense: PowerDVD had cleaner output & did not impose silly limitations on screen resolution.  I was not a little surprised to see the machine play movies back at 1600x1200 without dropping a frame.

The PowerDVD solution had its own problems: PowerDVD daily crashed the audio stack because of a bug in the driver for my sound card (Aureal 8830).  For some reason, changing the secondary IDE channel's access mode from PIO to DMA in Device Manager rectified these audio crashes.  It was the occasion of some chagrin that DMA was not the default!  Who wants to go through a year of crashes because someone buried an important setting three layers deep in the UI?

Miraculously, a driver for the Cinemaster 3.0 card eventually made it onto Windows Update--years after the operating system's release. If it is no longer available there, that may be because of contract disputes between Microsoft & the vendor, etc. In any case, the $50 expense may not be necessary for you, since the driver now exists.  (If you already downloaded the driver from Windows Update & you're still unable to play back DVDs at 800x600 resolution, I'm afraid I can't help much.)

The February 2003 sound card replacement eliminated a couple long-standing problems with Windows 2000's in-build Aureal Vortex2 driver.  The worst of these was a crash in the audio stack caused by key applications, including PowerDVD and Battlefield 1942.  The BF1942 crashes probably could have been suppressed by adjusting BF1942's audio settings, but--after staying the course for a few years--I generally felt it was time to give up using the Aureal card with Windows 2000. 

The replacement audio device, a Hercules card based on the Crystal 4624 chipset, was recommended by Microsoft's WHQL team.  That fixed the audio crashes & had the additional benefit of a louder output signal.  (The Windows 2000 Aureal driver featured a maladjusted maximum output level.)  Unfortunately, the one black mark on the face of the new card was that MP3 files periodically skipped a couple hundred milliseconds during playback.  After living with that for a while, I contacted Hercules.  They suggested trying a new player.  As it turns out, only Microsoft MP3 players exhibit the discontinuities when used with my new card (and operating system).  Now I'm a reluctant WinAmp customer!  (I always liked Windows Media Player 6.4 for its simplicity.  WMP 9.0 can be a bit bloated.)  WinAmp uses its own decoding libraries rather than l3codecx.ax, which ships with the OS.

It took a little over three years to get Windows 2000 fully operational on my hardware; fortunately, I enjoyed the struggle.  The results were well worth the effort.  NTFS and user-accessible process priorities alone might have justified the transition.  That is to say nothing about a full security infrastructure, or about in-build tools for performance analysis.  I have seen my machine do incredible things.

(Looking for more detail about a problem in the table?  Consider encouraging the author to finish this article.)

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