PCA Forums

1) Is there any way to get rid of the fade-in effect for the splash screen when the system is booting? I'm sure its a "cool" effect for the average joe, but when you are runnning dual MP1600+'s, its a slow down.

2) Which Nvidia drivers should I be using? I installed the 3.0.8.2 drivers off of nvidia's site, and I keep getting BSODs. After I reboot, the error report logs tell me its a driver problem, and the video drivers are the only non-XP standard drivers that have been installed. Any thoughts or tips?

3) Can I get rid of the MSN Messenger that starts up automatically? Everytime I try to stop it from msconfig, it just comes right back. hame

Other than this stuff, I've got to say that XP is pretty smotth so far. TIA.

http://www.tweakxp.com/tweakxp/

That site will tell you everything you need to know to tweak XP the way you want.

As far as nVidia drivers go, I'm using the 40's, they are beta but I don't seem to have any problems with them, some people do tho so...? The latest official ones are the 30's and they are good drivers as well...

Another great site is. http://www.windowsxp.nu

Agreed - Tweakxp.com has all that good info. I highly recommend looking through the "GUI" section. There's instructions in ther on how to turn off all the eye candy and (if you like) to make the desktop look and feel EXACTLY like Win2K.

The latest OFFICIAL drivers are indeed the 30.82 driver and they're rock solid as far as I've heard. I've heard of zero issues with them. Did you install XP clean or do an upgrade?

Try uninstalling the NVidia drivers completely by using the add/remove programs wizard in Control panel and then re-install them. Download them again in case you got a corrupt copy.

Avoid the Beta 40.x drivers.

If they continue to act up, search the net for the 29.42 drivers - they were good ones (might not be ideal for UT2K3 though).


As for that miserable POS MSN messenger, yes. Run MSN messenger. Cancel the signup crap and get to the program. Bring down the options menu and uncheck "Load MSN messenger on startup" and "allow to run in the background". Then close the program and right click on the icon and close that.

If you don't use MSN Messanger remove it completely by searching for sysoc.inf and removing the HIDE in the respective lines then goto Add/Remove and do Add/Remove Windows Components and deselect it.

the best way to remove win messenger is go to you DOS prompt and enter...


RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\msmgs.inf,BLC.Remove

agreed with:
If you don't use MSN Messanger remove it completely by searching for sysoc.inf and removing the HIDE in the respective lines then goto Add/Remove and do Add/Remove Windows Components and deselect it.


Except that I found if you install SP1 before doing this ... it wont work
So make sure you do it before SP1 or find another way

Well installing SP1 was the first thing I did after I installed, but I just signed in to MSN and disabled it from the menus.

I have been recieveing two BSODs pretty consistently so far. One is a Stop 0x1000008E when I am trying to do a full system scan with Norton 2003 (fully up to date per LiveUpdate). The other is a Stop 0x0000000A when I try to eject a CDRW from my drive (haven't tried a CDR yet). Using an HP 12x RW drive on an Adaptec 19160 controller w/ Nero 5.whatever-the-latest-updates-are. I receive these BSODs pretty consistently. I noticed an Adaptec's web site that they have beta drivers for my card under XP, but I would really rather not install a beta driver.

I haven't had time to do any digging yet on these, but I thought I would ask if anyone has seen similar errors and knows a quick fix.

Should I install the AMD busmastering drivers for my board? I ask because 1) I am using an AMD board (Tyan Tiger MPX S2466) and 2) I am using NO IDE devices (in fact I think both channels are disabled).

If you're not using the IDE controller at all, then you should disable (not remove - disable) it in Device Manager. Even with nothing connected and if it's disabled in BIOS, it's still running a driver and using IRQs - if the driver is flaky it could be causing your BSODs.

Do you have Norton Utils installed so it's running in the background? Don't. Norton is notorious for causing problems. I'd uninstall it and just install Disk Doctor and Speed Disk (and frankly if you have XP I wouldn't bother installing it at all - less is best sometimes, and Xp's tools work fine). Don't install any of the background stuff and just launch NDD and speeddisk manually.

System Doctor and any of the other Norton background apps are major resource hogs and can cause problems.

Only running Noteron AV, nothing else. It doesn't run in the background at all, I manually scan every day. I did finally complete a full system can without a BSOD earlier today, but I had to sit there and watch it run the entire time... didn't do anything else. Thankfully it doesn't take too long on a Dual 1600+ system.

I have disabled the IDE controlelrs in device manager as you suggested. I didn't know that they would still eat resources even with them disnabled. Go figure...

I have not been able to find anything regarding my ejecting CDRW problems. I have discovered that I cannot burn CDs either because I get buffer under run errors every time. Any thoughts ?