VIA Hyperion Driver Guide/FAQ

[PersianImmortal]

Given everything that you've tried, it'd seem most likely I'm afraid. The best solution would be to install the 4-in-1s, then George's 0.19 patch and leave it at that.

[Pemolis]

A really basic question

The A7V Motherboard made my asus, can I just install the via drivers from the via site or does asus modify the drivers to work for there board?

Its a fairly popular board and some feedback would help.

[PersianImmortal]

You can install the Via drivers on all via chipsets (unless otherwise advised in the readme file accompanying the driver).

However in general, whether with motherboards or graphics cards, when a particular manufacturer releases their own drivers it may contain optimisations or particular tweaks specific to their product, so it's worth installing them.

Usually however the manufacturer-specific drivers may be a version or two behind the current general drivers, so if you don't mind not having the latest, stick with the manufacturer ones.

[PersianImmortal]

Another useful tweak/tip I found out about courtesy of Oblong Cheese. Here's what he says in
this post:

Games were performing pretty ordinarily on my system, which isn't exactly slow. They used to work fine, but then all of a sudden they started stuttering, every few seconds the game would stop then start again, which is really annoying, and makes the games really difficult to play. I thought it had something to do with D3D, because it appeared to only happen in games that used D3D. I chopped and changed Detonator drivers, fiddled with settings, etc etc. Then I realised it was my HDD constantly being accessed during gameplay - I thought that was odd, it never used to happen. So I checked my IDE controller settings under Hardware Manager, and lo and behold it was set to PIO transfer mode! After a quick search, I discovered this, which then led me to this. From the initial URL:

quote:
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For repeated DMA errors.

Windows XP will turn off DMA mode for a device after encountering certain errors during data transfer operations. If more that six DMA transfer timeouts occur, Windows will turn off DMA and use only PIO mode on that device.
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How to fix it, from the second URL:

quote:
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To enable DMA mode using the Device Manager

Open Device Manager. Double-click IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers to display the list of controllers and channels. Right-click the icon for the channel to which the device is connected, select Properties, and then click the Advanced Settings tab. In the Current Transfer Mode drop-down box, select DMA if Available if the current setting is "PIO Only." If the drop-down box already shows "DMA if Available" but the current transfer mode is PIO, then the user must toggle the settings. That is: Change the selection from "DMA if available" to PIO only, and click OK. Then repeat the steps above to change the selection to DMA if Available.
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I never realised WinXP did that, and that you had to "toggle" back and forth to reactivate it, but it's well worth knowing if your system seems to slow down all of a sudden! Thanks Oblong Cheese.

[PersianImmortal]

Been helping out with some tips at the Morrowind Forums and one of the most common mistakes I see is a lack of understanding of BIOS settings. These are critical if you want your system to be optimal. If you screw these up, no software tweaking will fix some of your problems.

The best BIOS Guide I've seen is The Definitive BIOS Optimization Guide /EDIT - link fixed.

Read it and you'll see answers to questions like what is the AGP Aperature size, and what size should it be....or what is PCI Latency.

Even my own understanding of common BIOS features comes under scrutiny when I read this guide.

[KngtRider]

Since Windows 95 4.0.950, there have been 'bad' lists in the INFs and registry, for various things, DMA, SCSI, adv mobo features, OS or HW accel or controll of a certain feature, DAE (98 and up) and so on.

Not only this but NT has heaps of various performance and error counters measuring OS 'telemetry', compared to handful 9x has and it can/does adjust based on these.

Those who have flashed their bios and the changelog said 'fix ACPI error in event viewer for 2k or for xp' is example

the best examples of the bad lists are DMA and DAE, (obviously the latter needs DMA to do extraction).......

If you look in the cdrom inf and registry there is a flag that tells windows the capabilties of some troublesome/buggy drives, eg disable dae, allow dae or force. You get the idea, well the list is long, that is expected of early drives with dae.

DMA - some model chipsets especially OEM ones and early ones are buggy or cause data corruption with DMA or need propetry drivers. If there is a bug in the IDE controller or drive firmware or drivers and this results in severe data corruption which is an effect of faulty DMA, this is something no-one wants, drive manufacturer, chipset manufactuer, and so on.

(drivers was a common and critical problem , pertaining to the brand refered to in this thread, thankfully all good and fixed now and very stable and fast)

The point is, it is a good and important feature the OS has failsafe mechanisms, both from an end-user point of view who might not have any knowledge of any devices in their PC and from the develeor point of view who have to take into consideration many devices, softwares etc.

XP more than any MS os before it gives best performance and functionailty out of the box and needs little optimisation by the end-user.

I wish someone would write PLEASE ENABLE DMA on a big stick because some dont/wont (joking) I dont know how this people and/or newbies expect that they have a ata-133 controller/drives in their pc when they have it set for PIO4 which is 16.6MB/S....

[Whisper]

Originally posted by PersianImmortal
The best BIOS Guide I've seen is The Definitive BIOS Optimization Guide

PI, the proper location for the Guide you speak of is here http://www.rojakpot.com/

Cheers

[PersianImmortal]

Right you are

Another useful link is the new link to the GeForce FAQ which covers all GeForce cards.

This will help if you think the problem's with your Via mobo or BIOS graphics settings, when in all actuality it may be a graphics card/driver issue.

[Teren Powers]

I went to the Via site linked in the first post to get 4.38 and I think I read all the posts but on the site they go from 4.37 to 4.39b. Where is 4.38?

[Lombers]

Originally posted by Teren Powers
I went to the Via site linked in the first post to get 4.38 and I think I read all the posts but on the site they go from 4.37 to 4.39b. Where is 4.38?

On this page here:

http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=2

Hope that helps.

[Teren Powers]

Thanks very much, went and got it.

[Whisper]

Please Update for Latest Detonators

[PersianImmortal]

Done

[banderos]

Good to see you're Aussie PersianImmortal!

I have a question relating to resources...

I noticed that my sound card and geforce3 are share an irq (16 i think).
Does irq sharing actually affect performance?

On a related issue does it matter if I have a CDROM acting as a master to a HD on an IDE bus?

cheers,

Ben
Sydney.

[banderos]

p.s. just noticed the .com.AU.
DOH!