i have two old comps and i want to know which would be better for a second computer mainly for browsing the internet and DLing


one computer is a dual boot that has windows 2000 professional NT, in which i upgraded to XP Home edition (2 OS's now)

in disk management:

( C: ) partition, basic, NTFS, 27.95 GB (capacity) 1.53 GB(free space) 5% free

General Info: Pentium III 747 MHz, 384 MB of RAM




secondcomputer

had Windows ME and i upgraded it to XP home edition (only one OS now)

Disk Management:
( C: ) partition, basic, NTFS, 9.50 GB (capacity) 5.38 GB(free space) 56% free

General Info: Pentium III 863 MHz, 370 MB of RAM



which is better...they run just the same.... i dont udnerstand why the second computer only has 9.5 GB left.... thats low compared to the other one

it has 9.5GB of capacity (it would be termed as a 10GB drive) and 5.38GB free

the first one has a 30GB drive (which =27.95GB after formatting) and has 1.53GB free

why??????

that's like asking why do some current machines come with a 160GB drive and others with a 250GB drive..

better is relative..both of the cpus are running fairly close, though at those speeds the ~100MHz of difference actually works out to a ~12% difference...that reading of 370MB of ram in the second machine indicates that most likely something is messed up as it doesn't divide by 64 as it should...

what may be more indicative of 'better' is the MoBo that is being used as that may indicate other factors of 'betterness'...IMHO they are both ancient and pretty much unusable for modern day software (sure, they work but are sloooooooow)...

if I had to make a statement, the first machine is better as the HDD is larger and the ram is apparently functioning properly with a stick of 256MB ram and another of 128MB ram...both most likely PC100 (again, very slow in comparison to what's in use today)

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So Long and Thanks for All the Files
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Beware of the big 3 insurance companies in Texas! Read your policies carefully (maybe you'll need a lawyer) Allstate, Farmers & State Farm are overextended and their 'coverage' is worthless...a true waste of your money Read This

but you see, this is my second option computer. mainly i use it for bearshare and internet .....nothing else really maybe some musicmatch

but thats all...

when you say they run slow....what runs slow ?

internet runs just as fast as any other computer i have used...

the first computer i described was the one i was talking about the other day to you.

i deleted the WINNT folder and edited the BOOT.ini and deleted the NT OS in the notepad...


then i restarted...

and it said system halted....

and then i restarted it again

then XP loaded....and then it was working fine, i tried to use bearshare but it wasnt working again so i deleted it and restarted again

then it wouldnt load back up to XP....

so i re-installed the XP home edition with the CD-ROM


then i had trouble installing it and it took me a couple times for it to install properly


by the way it wouldnt let me delete the other partition and it wouldnt let me make another partition...

and so i just chose "upgrade"

now everything works again, but i still have NT on there ....


im not sure what to do now

download this: Darik's Boot and Nuke (Hard Drive Disk Wipe) ....

boot off of it and totally wipe your HDD clean as a whistle...

then boot off of your XP cd and do a clean install...

fast is relative...as far as general internet browsing and stuff you probably notice little...

but try and download a .avi movie and recode it to DVD...then you will know what slow is..my 3GHz system here with 2GB of ram will encode and burn a typical .avi movie in abour an hour....

__________________


So Long and Thanks for All the Files
_____________________________________________

Beware of the big 3 insurance companies in Texas! Read your policies carefully (maybe you'll need a lawyer) Allstate, Farmers & State Farm are overextended and their 'coverage' is worthless...a true waste of your money Read This

it would behoove you to research your MoBo and determine if it needs chipset drivers specific to it...after install of the OS that is the first thing that should be installed then reboot and install other drivers such as video and LAN..

__________________


So Long and Thanks for All the Files
_____________________________________________

Beware of the big 3 insurance companies in Texas! Read your policies carefully (maybe you'll need a lawyer) Allstate, Farmers & State Farm are overextended and their 'coverage' is worthless...a true waste of your money Read This