Best Windows OS for multimedia 600E 400mhz?

[PCWatchman]

Opinions, experience please.

I bought 600E 2645-5BU 400mhz. BIOS says it's PII, other CPU ID program I have says Celeron. What's correct?

I got it with XPPro, 128MB ram. It played DVD's terribly. I reformatted and installed W2KPro, performance was only slightly better.

I reformatted and installed W98SE and everything runs fast, DVD isn't perfect, but close.

I really want W2Kpro on it. Anybody know how to get DVD's to play properly with W2Kpro?

Currently using K-Lite Codec Pak/Media Player Classic.

Thanks

[GomJabbar]

The main thing is to make sure that DMA is enabled for the DVD drive. Go to Device Manager and check under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Secondary IDE channel should have DMA enabled (the Primary IDE channel should too, as this is for your hard drive). If you are running PIO mode, that is no good. I had a 400Mhz 600E that played DVD's quite well with W2K and PowerDVD 4.

EDIT: FTR I had 192MB RAM on the above 600E.

[tfflivemb2]

You can actually run XPPro quite well on it, but I would add atleast 256MB ram. You can go as high as 512mb plus 32mb onbaord (total of 544mb). I have run XPPro on many quite well with the 288mb (256mb+32mb).

DVDs will play better at 288mb, but not necessarily perfect. Increasing to 544mb would show a drastic improvement, I would think, but I haven't added that much to a 600E before, since the 256mb PC100 (low density) chips can be expensive.

[sktn77a]

The 400MHz 600E should play DVDs just fine if the DVD drive is good. Update to the latest versions of directX and video drivers. Try VLC DVD player (uses the least CPU of any). W98 and W2K are great for the 600E. XP needs at least 288Mb RAM and preferably 544 on the 600E.

[AlphaKilo470]

I bought 600E 2645-5BU 400mhz. BIOS says it's PII, other CPU ID program I have says Celeron. What's correct?

You have a Pentium II. The mobile Pentium II's starting with the Mobile Pentium II 300PE feature a full speed on chip cache of 256kb as opposed to the desktop counterparts with 512kb of slower half speed off chip cache. This actually makes the mobile Pentium II faster than the desktop counterparts but it also throws off some diagnostics softwares because of the different cache configuration.

The desktop and notebook Celerons were essentially Pentium II cores with 128kb of full speed cache on the chip and because of this, the Celeron and mobile Pentium II had some similarities which is why some software will confuse some mobile Pentium IIs for Celerons.