ZBrushCentral

Help and advice needed

Community
#1

:frowning: :frowning: :frowning: :frowning: :frowning: :frowning: :frowning: :frowning: :frowning:
Hi all,

I need a little support with my system and I figured you guys/gals would help (as usual).

I changed over from ME to Win 2K last month and although individual programs (including ZBrush) run fine with minimal crashes I find the overall OS to be slow and terrible at multi-tasking. The system takes forever to boot up to the administrator login.

For example, under Win98 I would have had ZBrush, Photoshop, internet explorer, WSFTP, ICQ and Outlook running all together with a permenant modem connection. To change applications I would simply ALT+TAB back and forth as required.

Trying to get Win 2K to do this leaves me with a hanging computer for about a minute (no mouse movement possible) and frequently locks up all together. From that point on the mouse becomes jerky for the first 3-4 seconds that I move it.

Can anyone suggest anything that I may try to sort this out???

  1. I have just realised that the main C drive is formatted to NTFS whilst the two other 30 gig drives are still FAT 32. Will this be slowing things down?

  2. Drive 2 and 3 are in removable racks? Will this slow things down.

  3. I have given each hardrive a swap file as per the Win 2K book I bought. Is this right?

  4. Someone told me that is sounds like driver problems. Is this likely? I had to download most of the Win 2K specific drivers for most of my peripherals. Could all this be the graphic card having driver issues??

Any help greatly apprieciated and again I will stress that ZBrush in isolation runs like a dream.

ps. My system as of today is an AMD 1 gig, 512RAM, Geforce2 GTS 32meg, A KT7-A RAID board, 3x3gig drives(fast ones), 21" HP monitor.

Many thanks.

Glen

#2

Hi… I won’t be too much help. One of the regulars most likely will do better, but I use win 2000 pro and love it. I often have a program rendering, like Vue, while I play in either poser, or PSP… Now I got zbrush I’ve forgotten those programs for the moment ~G~ Along with that I always have my email open, icq and netscape. Only time it ever pauses on me is during a render, but it’s minimal and to be expected. Did you change your graphic card driver? If not I’d check it. Check all your drivers. Hope you get it cleaned up soon.

#3

Hi,

You may have tried this…

If you feel it could be your graphics card…
hold down F8 at boot up…in the pop up window ‘enable VGA mode’…this option tells win 2000 to boot normally, but with only a standard vga driver…if the sys works well from this point…you know there is a driver problem with your video card…or possible conflict.

If you are using NTFS…then it makes sound sense to use it on all drives.

I haven’t used win2000 with anything other than Intel cpu(s). However I have read this:
NT was designed to support different cpu platforms…HAL holds all sys. specific drivers…from the rest of the sys…
Win2000 shares the same organisation of drivers, but Microsoft chose to drop support for all but Intel x86in win2000.

Have you…‘snapped in’ Device manager through your Microsoft Management Console…if not do so…then look for conflicts.

I have only ever used removable drives once…no noticeable drop in speed.

Normally if mouse flickers etc…indicates conflict to me.

Slow boot up…windows searching for drivers…and may end up loading and checking default ones.

These things may help.

#4

Brava Ed!

I would have to agree with everything Mr. Atom said. :sunglasses: :+1:

#5

Hey Southern

Any update on this problem???

My 2 cents …

  1. Try the Ctrl-Alt-Delete thing which will bring up the Task Manager, switch to the Processes-Tab and check out what device is sucking up your CPU usage.

  2. The fat32 thing and NTFS is fine and won’t slow your machine down. A Swap-file is a virtual ram file much like the the temp file in the ZBrush draw. You have plenty of ram, so you won’t need to have big swap files (just have one on your ntfs partition).

  3. It may be your Raid card. Aurick had a problem with this … and I can’t find the thread he wrote it in … (somewhere in the community forum)

  4. Do you still have your old machine? Throw the old graphics card into your new one and install the drivers (in safe-mode) just to test if the lag is your graphics card.

2 cents worth. I’m not an expert, but this is my process of elimination. Let us know how you are getting along.
Upham :slight_smile:

Oh, it could be your 21 inch monitor!! Send me your monitor and I’ll test it for six months! :smiley: :smiley:

#6

I had a total nightmare with switching to Win2K (and in the end actually went to XP, which has worked great – sorry, Kathy ;)).

Win2K does have some difficulties with harware driver compatibilities. This is especially true for NVidia graphics cards. If you have one, then you’re going to have a devil of a time getting things right, but it can be done – my system runs a GeForce3 after a whole lot of swearing and tears.

The majority of problems that power users have with 2K are due to the fact that it uses a system (that I unfortunately forget the name of off the top of my head) to give all of your PCI devices the same IRQ during boot up. Your AGP slot is part of the PCI system, so it gets dumped in there, too. The NVidia cards are especially particular about being on IRQ11 (and I suspect that many others are similar), and 2K likes to give everything IRQ9. Check out your hardware profile to see if that’s what’s going on. In a nutshell, you can have all the right drivers and still be dead in the water thanks to this IRQ sharing. It’s another one of those great Microsoft ideas that has serious problems in the implementation.

If this is the problem, the only way to undo it is unfortunately to reinstall Windows. There are then a few tricks that you can do to disable the new IRQ system and return to the old, but this can only be set up during Win2K install. (Hopefully, you have your OS on its own partition…?) Let me know if this is what’s happening, and I’ll dig up the instructions for you to be able to overcome it.

Once 2K is stable, it’s VERY stable. But you will always fight with the compatibility issue – both in software and hardware. I know that Kathy is going to hate me for saying this, but if it comes down to reinstalling Windows I would recommend going to XP at the same time (which is really NT6). It is MUCH friendlier with its compatibilities, just as stable, and does boot faster. You’ll still want to override the IRQ sharing, and need to get the right drivers (although it comes with most of what you could ever need – I only needed to hunt for one driver), but it’s actually worth it.

#7

Hee hee.

I don’t take OS’s personally aurick. :smiley: :wink:

#8

Many thanks everyone. I knew you lot would help me out. I was just about to go and buy a geforce III but Im going to try everything that is suggested above. I am sure it is the drivers as you mostly suggest and Ill be buggering about with it late into the night tonight. Having just had Win2K bought for me (by a very generous benefactor) I am reluctant to ditch it for XP.

We shall see. I am thinking of ditching the RAID board as that has been a pain since day one. Does XP support over half a gig of ram???.

we shall see.

Glen

#9

Yeah I’m running XP with over 500 meg of Ram. XP is optimise to run with pentium 4 and the new Rambus Ram that has cooling gel on the chips! I think you can have 4-gig of ram with XP… (please correct me if I’m wrong anyone!)

And even tho it’s not very helpful at the moment … when you have your OS up and running -> get a disk-imaging program!!! It’s a life-saver. If you screw up your settings it’s so nice to know you’ll be up and running again in 10 minutes. I have a partition for my OS, a partition for my applications, and a second drive for my recent files, which get backed up via the Windows Scheduled Tasks (back onto my first drive). And my recent files gets backed up onto CD when it reaches the 650mb mark.
Once bitten, twice shy. I’m not going to let a computer crash get in the way of a deadline again!!
Anybody got any other methods for keeping there computers in tip-top shape?
Upham :slight_smile:

#10

Just wanted to add that I have a GeForce2 on Win2K, and have never had a problem with it…
Good luck Southern! :slight_smile: