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Background to this page

My wife works from home and does some farly extensive data manipulation inside MS Access.
Some of her queries were taking upto 4 hours to run on her old P266 with 256M RAM, so we decide it was time to upgrade her machine.

Here's the story

We are running Windows NT4 (workstation) on a 16Mb full-duplex Token Ring network with four other machines.

Well I got the machine home and made a start.

• I fitted a 4Gb disk (to use as my System volume) as Master and another 2Gb disk as Slave, to the ATA66 Primary EIDE controller.
• The DVD ROM as Master along with the OnStream 30Gb TBU as Slave were already fitted to the ATA66 Secondary EIDE controller.
• I fitted the two ATA100 30Gb drives as Masters on the Primary and Secondary ATA100 controller ports.
• Finally I fitted the IBM PCI AutoLANStreamer network adapter and started trying to install NT.

Now I hadn't worked with the ATA100 drives before, and was blissfully unaware that the system board provided its own special 'Promise' BIOS to handle the large fast drives.
Of-course NT knew all about that .... NOT !!!
Fortunately the motherboard had come supplied with the necessary driver CD AND it had an NT driver section.
Shame NT simply WOULD NOT be persuaded to load the driver at install time but aaahh ... these things were sent to try us .... and they do. Once NT was installed ... I installed the driver through the SCSI devices in Control Panel.

Now NT was installed, the next thing was to install the WinFast AGP video driver software. It installed fine but the TV/Out option was disabled and a number of the option tabs spoken of in the user guide were simply not-there. To cut the story short, again, later drivers were the answer to the missing option tabs. The disabled TV/Out option ... that was more tricky !
You have to have the TV/Video device attached before the option becomes enabled ... it's auto-sensing !

Next I went to install the OnStream Tape backup software. No such luck ... couldn't see the device at all.
This eventually tracked down to needing a later version of the On-Stream software TOGETHER WITH an update of the VIA 4in1 drivers.

Now the exciting bit.
The DVD.
We'd all been looking forward to this. The kids had their first DVD movies all waiting to play.
Load the WinDVD software that came with the WinFast AGP video card. ... Looks good.
Put the DVD in the drive. OSD pops up and says "PLAY"
.... nothing else happens
.... we wait
.... nope that's all folk.
We hit the Play button (in-fact any control) on the GUI DVD player and the screen freezes.
Alt-tab, Alt-Esc, Mouse, all no-go.
Alt-ctrl-del, tab to Task Manager and find that PowerDVD and the DVD Player are both "Not Responding".
Highlight either one and "End Task"

... OOooopps !! BAD BAD move ! Now the entire OS is locked solid. - It NEVER comes back.
You can contact the machine over the LAN and the processor is still running, but the OS is RS .... Kaputt !
Only one option ... hard-reset !!

Again for the sake of brevity.
Having tried all manner of things including alternate DVD software, BIOS settings, updated video card BIOS and drivers, changed interrupts,
... you name it I tried it.
I searched the web. I searched MS TechNet. I searched the newsgroups. There wasn't many avenues I left untried.

Finally I stumbled across an article on some FAQ somewhere that mentioned a similar problem under Win200 being caused by automatic video buffer expansion and how you could hack the registry to stop it from expanding its buffer.
Armed with that information I discovered under the display properties setting a little check-box under the "TNT 2 Model 64 Properties" dialog on the "OpenGL Settings" tab, called "Enable buffer region extension". It was ticked by default. I un-ticked it and naturally, the DVD now played absolutely perfectly !!!!!

AAAAaaaaaarrrrrgggghhhh !!!!

The next obstacle was the continual lockups while moving through documents. This could happen when scolling, clicking, using the page-up/down or left/right keys.
Suddenly the keyboard and mouse would stop responding. There was suddenly no way to communicate with the PC. Even coming in through the LAN you would find the processor had halted.
No error messages. No blue-screens. No warning. Nothing !
Again after many e-mails and hours of searching I yet again stumbled on another Win2000 article (TechNet this time) which mentioned a problem with the Ring Buffer overflowing on the Mouse/Keyboard.
Sure enough, when you know what to look for, there in the System event log is either or both of the following informational entries;

Source: Mouclass
Event: 11
Description: The ring buffer that stores incoming mouse data has overflowed (buffer size is configurable via the registry)

or

Source: i8042prt
Event: 12
Description: The ring buffer that stores incoming mouse data has overflowed (buffer size is configurable via the registry)

Usually followed within a couple of minutes by the usual system restart events.

The specified registry hack on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Syetem\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters showed both the keyboard and the mouse queues were set at 100 bytes.
I first tried them both at 200 bytes, then 500 bytes and finally now at 1000 bytes (3e8 hex) we seem to have erradicated the lockups.

The keys in question are ...

• MouseDataQueueSize
• KeyboardDataQueueSize

Now as we all know, locking an OS like NT is a bad thing to do, it leaves files open etc etc etc.
That's ok. Autochk will run and take care of things at restart.
Weeeell .... not quite !
You see for some currently unknown reason, NT thinks the 30Gb ATA100 D: drive has become as follows ....

The type of the file system is NTFS.
This NTFS volume was created or modified by a later version of Windows NT.
This version of chkdsk cannot be run on this volume.
You must boot the version of NT that created/modified this volume and run
chkdsk from that installation.

Yeah well ... !!
I tried various things including another article on using the Win2000 chkdsk ... it doesn't even think the drive is NTFS !
In the mean-time there are now two directories on the drive which I cannot access in any way. Rename, Delete, View, .... nothing.
Having tried a fair few disk utilities, I am now waiting on a copy of On-Track Suite 3.0 to see if it can at-least remove the corrupt entries.

(NB. System Suite 2000 arrived but it couldn't fix the problem either. I eventually backed-up all the remaining good data off drive D:, restored it to drive E:, swapped the driver lettering in NT's Disk Administrator, rebooted and got around the problem that way.)

Two other minor headaches.
Software this time

• It turns out that Adobe do not support Acrobat 4.0 (pdf writer) on the Thunderbird when running under WinNT4.
  There is a bug which stops you from getting into the customisation settings. (It crashes the OS too !)
• And finally, I still cannot get TimeLord the internet PC clock time-synchronisation tool, to install, despite working with it's creator who believed it should work. We are still resolving it.

STATUS UPDATE as at 9 June 2001
STABILITY AT LAST !

• Well Adobe Acrobat (pdf writer) is still not supported under WinNT4 on the Thunderbird, even with Adobe's latest offering of Version 5. This version still has the bug which stops you from getting into the File-Preferences-General customisation settings.
• With the continued assistance of the developer of TimeLord the internet PC clock time-synchronisation tool, we managed to get the latest version to install and load. It transpired to NOT BE RELATED TO THE ATHLON. It was in-fact a problem relating to having more than four alternate phone numbers in Dial Up Networking (DUN).

Now Back To The Main Story ...

Much troubled and muddy water has flowed under the bridge since I first created this page in Feb 2001.
To cut a VERY long story short, having resolved the ...

• radio mouse and keyboard over-runs
• got the DVD to play DVD's
• got the TV-Out working on the WinFast Leadtek s325 video card
• got NAV to install and work correctly
• got the Token Ring network card recognised (and working in FULL Duplex mind-you !)
• got the OnStream 30Gb tape backup system to work properly

Now, the hitches here are;

• When you load the VIA 4in1 drivers under WinNT4, the graphics section does not get loaded, therefor you never get offered the option to throttle back from AGP "TURBO" mode (as you would under other OS's). Under NT4, only the VIA DMA tool gets installed.
• Looking in the Nvidia controls, there is no apparent control to limit the AGP bus rate there either.
• OK, so it must be controlled in BIOS ... WRONG again ... at-least not directly.
  The closest you seem to come with the BIOS on the A7V is that you can set the System Performance Setting back from Optimal to Normal which has the effect of forcing the AGP bus to run at 1x, but also has the undesirable effect of noticeably killing the entire system performance.
  You can also switch the AGP 4x Drive Strength from Auto to Manual which then activates two other BIOS menu items, one being AGP Drive Strength P Ctrl and the other being AGP Drive Strength N Ctrl
  These two options can be set anywhere between 0 thru F, and as close as I can come to what they do, is that one is the AGP bus timing and the other is the signal strength, with a commonly used manual setting of AE.
  Since I could not get a definative answer on which was which, and what the settings did, I avoided messing with these, although I suspect that if I knew what I was doing, this may have got my 4x AGP card working.

Since I could find no obvious way to force the 2x/4x AGP card down to 2x without undesirable side-effects, I purchased an older 8Mb SIS 2x AGP card off a collegue, and although the graphics are noticeably slower and the DVD will not run properly on it, AT LEAST MY WIFE'S SYSTEM IS STABLE !

The only real issues left now are:

• Data corruption on the ATA100 drives (apparently another "known problem" with the Promise drivers)
• The Acrobat writer problem
• Getting a better video card that will work at 2x AGP but still provide sufficient performance to run the DVD and business graphics properly

Till the next update then ... Happy processing to you all.

Well I think that about sums it up.
If you have any specific questions, e-mail me on the link below.