Thinkpads Forum

A while back I got my 600E off of Ebay without an OS.(2645 Aau) I installed 2000 pro, pumped up the ram, upgraded the cpu to 400 Mhz, (from 366),and for the most part, this machine runs quite well for an older laptop. Scanning through these threads, I have read that upgrading to Windows XP will improve the video playback on the dvd. My dvd player is a bit choppy, and I was wondering if it is really that much better with XP. A friend of mine has Windows 98 on his 600 and the video is much smoother than mine.
Is it worth messing with?

I suspect it would be the opposite, namely upgrading to XP would make it worse, because XP requires more resources and power to perform properly. I tried playing DVDs on a 400MHz 600E with 224MB of RAM using PowerDVD5 and it was quite choppy. How much RAM do you have?

If you don't plan on watching videos and using a DVD player and are willing to cope with a slightly longer boot time, Windows 2000 would be excellent as it supports the 600 series very well and performs with lightning speeds in non-multimedia applications.

However, Windows XP, even on my 300mhz ThinkPad 600, runs like a charm, boots pretty fast and when I tweak my display just right, I can even get DivX and DVD playback on my machine without an extra hardware video solution. Actual performance in non-multimedia applications, while somewhat sluggish, still exceeds the range of "acceptable" by a long shot.

Due to better multimedia support, more features and more support from Microsoft, I'm going to recommend XP for any system with a PII 300 or better and 128mb RAM or better. For any computer that falls short of those specs and/or isn't to be expected to run much multimedia chores, Windows 2000 gets my reccomendation. Once you get into the Pentium IIIs and better, the performance differences between Windows 2000 and XP start to become moot and provided you have good hardware, multimedia capabilities between the two should be similar thus I'd say it's a matter of personal preference for that range of computers.

AlphaKilo470 wrote:If you don't plan on watching videos and using a DVD player and are willing to cope with a slightly longer boot time, Windows 2000 would be excellent

Are you implying that on a 600E, WinXP plays DVDs better than Win2K? I have not compared them on a 600E, but did on a Gateway desktop with either 450MHz or 700MHz PIII (I forget which one). With Win2K, it played DVDs smoothly, but with XP, it became choppy.

There is no question that the OP's 600E will run XP well -- even a 300MHz Celeron TP240 runs XP just fine -- but for playing DVDs, Win2K should do a better job.

On the 400mhz 600E I used to own, I could never get Win 2k to pay DVDs in a watchable manner regardless of color depth. In XP, they'd play smoothly and nicely as long as I kept my display set to 16 bit color.

If you have a hardware acceleration soltion, then Windows 2K will most likely perform on par or above par than would XP but for something like the 600E which would rely a good bit on software, XP, if set up right, will yield some performance advantages or at least in my experiences, it does.

When I got my first 600E (366 MHz?) I installed Win98SE because I thought it would take fewer resources and run better. After having a few problems and having to reinstall the OS, I decided to give XP a try. To my surprise the machine performs much better with XP than Win98. It takes a bit longer to boot, but once booted performance is much snappier. I have the memory maxed out , so I'm sure that helps. It's well worth a few seconds boot time for the added running performance though. I did follow some tips and trim XP down a bit, as well as eliminated the splash screen and a few other tricks to minimize boot time. Forget exactly what I did, just found some tips and tricks on the internet and applied them. Can't say that they made a big difference in boot time, but surely didn't hurt anything.

I had some problems playing back AVI video files. This was solved by using a different program. I'm not sure what my color settings are -- several have suggested that using 16 bit resolution improves playback. On mine the sound was lagging behind the video. Can't recall the software used now, but I posted about this in mid summer. Search for posts by me and you should be able to find it and an answer.

farna wrote:When I got my first 600E (366 MHz?) I installed Win98SE because I thought it would take fewer resources and run better. [...] To my surprise the machine performs much better with XP than Win98. It takes a bit longer to boot, but once booted performance is much snappier.

This is the opposite of my experience on my 600X machines. Windows 98SE is noticeably snappier for me than any of my other Windows OS installs (2000,XP): under 98SE programs start more quickly, the desktop refreshes more quickly, file listings appear more quickly, boot time is shorter, and release of control back to the mouse is shorter when multi-tasking.

Of course, the OP is looking for a comparison between 2000 and XP, but I nevertheless wanted to pipe in on the subject of win98. 2000/XP are both much much more stable than 98SE, and you could therefore argue that performance is better in those newer OSes, but there are very few cases where either of them are "snappier" or more responsive than 98SE. Under XP, return from Suspend/Hibernation is noticeably faster than 98SE, but aside from that I can't think of anything I do where I notice XP to be snappier than 98SE. Any Windows OS can get bogged down if you've got a bunch of unnecessary junk installed, but on two clean installs or on two comparable, trimmed down installs, I think you'll find 98SE is "super-snappy" compared to either 2000 or XP on any machine up to about a 1GHz CPU (assuming that you are also using programs that were designed for win 98 and not 2000/XP).

Phil.

Right now I have 256M of RAM. Does XP take up more room than 2000 Pro? This machine only has a 6 gig hard drive, but I don't use it for storing media. It is mostly a take-along for travel and hot spot internet use, and some excel spread sheets. But I would like to improve the DVD playback.

128mb RAM or better.

XP with only 128 Ram?

I recommend Win2000. IMHO on older machines XP has too much eye candy and acts sluggish.

I didn't read the whole thread but I noticed the words - improve DVD playback.

You should get Margi DVD Decoder on ebay. They have it for 9.99 buy it now and on my P2 300 Mhz, they play just fine, regardless of XP or Windows 2000.

However, that same card is causing Windows XP not to resume from standby. The driver was never officially written for Windows XP for Margi DVD Decoder so I suspect it could be a problem there. Other than that I pretty much don't care, what I do care are the well tweaked colors of the LCD. There are some minor stair stepping artifacts but overall I am very happy with the DVD Playback.

No matter what IMO, the newer DVD's will not play smoothly unless you have a Pentium III based processor, or Pentium II 450 which I think was the last one in P2 Series without the help of DVD Decoder.

That would be my two cents.

Also my thinkpad 2645-45U P2 300 with 224 Ram and due to video ram (2MB) 24 bit color is not supported on 1024x768 (I can only do 16-bit). However, that doesn't affect DVD playback. But mainly due to video driver, I can also only get 1 frame 1 field playback, not 1 frame 2 fields (so it appears as 60 frame video).

Compaq Armada 7400 S3 Virge driver does a better job only in Windows 98 with Compaq's video driver and yes also with Margi DVD Decoder.

I have a 400Mhz 600E and I have ran both 2000 and XP on the machine. XP is defiantly faster than 2000 is, but 2000 does not use as much memory that XP needs. I do find that XP has better performance than 2000 does on my machine. I do want to add that i trim down XP significantly to on boot it uses about 80-90 MB of memory before all of my security programs load. With 2000 i can have it trimmed to about 75 MB of memory used. DVD playback is better on XP because it can handle multimedia better than 2000 can. Keep in mind that the video card in the 600 is not very good, so don't expect flawless DVD playback. Media Player Classic is the best program to use on that machine and the color MUST be in 16 bit. Lowering the screen resolution will help. XP boots faster than 2000 does on my 600E, but that is the biggest difference i can find between the two. Basically, use the OS that you prefer. You will not notice big differences between 2000 and XP on a 600E

Stargate199 wrote:XP boots faster than 2000 does on my 600E

That's my experience as well, not only for the 600E but all other (about three) machines on which I compared the two versions, including machines with only 128 to 192MB of RAM. However, after the computer has finished booting, programs seem to start slightly faster in Win 2K.

I got a margi video decoder off of ebay, but after installing it and downloaing a driver from driverguide.com, the video is smooth as can be. however, I have no sound. According to the faq's on the Margi support site, I need to contact my audio chipset manufacturer for drivers that support Zoomed Video. I googled that. and checked in the ibm website, but have yet to find anything for my 600E. Any suggestions?

I have three 600e's and two 600's. All are running XP and most -- at one time or another -- have run win2k. Both operating systems run fine on all of these machines. Both benefit from more RAM and faster disks. All must be set to 16 bit color to play DVDs smoothly. The 600's require a Margi decoder.

OP, your machine does not need the Margi card. If you want to use it, I can try to help you get it working, but you don't need it and it cannot help your battery life.

In my experience, 16 bit color is the most important factor. After that, RAM -- you must have 160m to run XP. That is 128m for XP plus 32m for your video. I recommend more, but, except for databases, I have seen no improve (outside benchmark utilities) adding memory about 192m.

Another possible factor is the DVD player itself. It may be struggling to read the platters -- especially if you burned them yourself.

Finally, what player are you using? Some of the newer players can drag your performance down. Run something close to the vintage of your machine.

I have two players, I have mediamatic and inter-actual player. Both perform about the same. As for RAM I've got a 224MB installed. I assume when you say 16 bit color you are talking about the computer display settings, and yes, I have it set to that. The DVD ROM drive seems to work fine, as far as I can tell. However, it didn't want to recognize a certain movie disc, and I got a message saying that the disc needed to be formatted, I found that a bit odd.

mediametrics is the player shipped with thinkpads. i find it works well. i think i suspect your dvd player. do you have access to another?

I can see if I can borrow one from a co-worker, at least then I would know if mine is NFG before I purchase another.

Hello.

I see you got the margi decoder but got some issues. I had a hard time getting it to work a bit, but eventually learned what are the possible solutions.

The DVD player that they ship with the decoder is not the fanciest however, I find Windows Media Player to be a good substitute and so far only THIS player I found to take advantage of it. Also WMP is capable of DVD Playback only in XP. It also brings out the best in picture as it uses the Smoothing feature. Margi's DVD player doesn't have that option.

Zoom video port was not necessary in my case. The sound is routed through Line In input so I was able to get it through that, I just increase the Line in input. Did you check that by any chance? Do you have any Line in input if you use the standard line in/mic ports (from some sound source).

I can't tell which sound chip is exactly on my Thinkpad 600 but it should be no different than yours.

Both PCMCIA sockets are Zoom enabled as my older thinkpad is capable of playing it through either port.

In my case either Windows 2000 and XP were able to play the sound successfully. Keep me posted on this as I am very curious.

UDX wrote:You should get Margi DVD Decoder on ebay. They have it for 9.99 buy it now and on my P2 300 Mhz, they play just fine, regardless of XP or Windows 2000.

However, that same card is causing Windows XP not to resume from standby. The driver was never officially written for Windows XP for Margi DVD Decoder so I suspect it could be a problem there. Other than that I pretty much don't care, what I do care are the well tweaked colors of the LCD. There are some minor stair stepping artifacts but overall I am very happy with the DVD Playback.

I had a thought on your Margi issue -

You could try "stopping" the card (as if you were going to eject it, but not actually ejecting it) prior to going into standby? that might allow for proper resume, but I don't know if it polls the hardware when it comes back up. You'd have to pop the card out and reinsert it after resume, but it might be a workaround.

Also, is there any chance that the driver for this card has become "abandonware", such that someone might have made their own XP driver based on it? Might be worth a google search for such a thing (or perhaps a home-brew driver).

Rob

Changing the direction of the discussion a bit... The OP asked about performance of 2000 vs. XP for DVD playback. What about performance while surfing Flash-heavy sites.

To explain, I'm trying to set up my 600e for my young daughter. It's the same 600e in my signature: PII 366mhz, 288mb RAM, and the original 6GB IBM disk. I've set it up with Win98SE in the hope of getting maximal speed, albeit with software limitations.

Most things seem to work well until I try surfing to some of her favorite sites (e.g., Yahooligans (kids.yahoo.com) or Barbie.com) which appear to be so Flash-laden that they bring things to a crawl. Is this a case where upgrading to, say, Win2K would help? My gut says no, but I'm open to advice.

Any other upgrade hints/advice. I do have a PIII 450mhz MMC-2 waiting to be installed. I assume that that would make a difference, no?

Thanks...

The Margi card I got from ebay only came with a couple of floppys for Windows 95 installation, which did me no good for my W2K. I tried to get a driver from Margis' web site, but was unsuccessful, so I got one from driverguide.com. So I never actually got a player with margi.
By the way, I swapped dvd drives with a co-worker and there was no difference in playback.
I have since removed the Margi card and am just useing my mediamatic player. It is less than perfect, but I will live with it the way it is.

Ouch, lot of things to read !

Forgive me, I haven't read everything.

I experienced the 2 OSes on my TP 600 (PII366, 288 MB RAM, 20GB 5400rpm HDD).

Windows 2000 : Takes time to boot, but is lighter than XP in everyday use. Of course, it will take less resources. No problem with installation, everything's running perfectly.

Windows XP : You'll see that it uses more resources, You'll need to tweak it more, to have a system as light as W2K, but it's a more recent soft, so, it's more secure, better for multimedia.

I watch DVDs on my TP (with XP), and everything goes right. 24 bits, 1024x768 full screen.

I must admit, tough, that I like to have a light system, so, I tweaked XP a lot.

When it starts, it uses only 85 MB on RAM.

(I had tweak W2K a lot too, and it was using as low as 35 MB when starting !!! A true rocket !!! )

You'll prefer XP if you want to use Wi-Fi, if you want to surf (SP2, IE7, Live Messenger...) all these softs are better for the security of your machine...

If XP appears too choppy on your machine, don't forget that the 600E can be easily upgraded (You can stick a PIII 850, you can put 512 MB of RAM in it, you can use quasi every HDD that exist nowadays - even a 120GB drive will be accepted).

You'll find great tutorials on the web, to improve and to tweak Windows XP, especially this one, which is, I think, the Bible of every wannabe XP tweaker :

http://www.bold-fortune.com/forums/inde ... owforum=13

If you prefer W2K, don't forget that you can use some of the tips described in Bold Fortune's tutorial too.

W.

2nd Edit; Well here's a wild idea. Thinpads support several OS'es. Why not use something like Ghost to backup your drive (Windows 2000 installation - keep in mind if you restore it there is always that initial found new hardware and restart prompt, but it should work fine nonetheless - it's some sort of hard disk volume identifier I think that gets changed but I have never had any problems using that).

You have as your choice Windows 98 SE (I wouldn't bother with ME, nor Below) and Windows XP. Windows XP, again will give you advantage of using WMP as your DVD player. That's what I use with Margi card and it works fine.

Just something "else" to try unless the driver that I mention below gets everything going.

Remember, increase the volume in Margi DVD application after everything is installed, and try couple more DVD's. Some DVD's I think are just not supported I think - Can't do much about that part, but something like Star Wars 3, GOAL!, Underworld 1 and 2 should work fine at least for testing purposes.

!!! One more important EDIT;

I just remembered this. If you decide to go with Win 98 SE and if you have NeoMagic 128ZV/ZV+/XD driver (as it's shown in my XP device manager) you CAN'T USE IBM's Official Graphics driver, rather Get one from DELL (version A05 or A06 which I have also backed up).

I know it's crazy but it won't work, you'll get a weird error message.

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Oh man. Sorry, I didn't mean to give you a bad suggestion for Margi decoder but since TP 600 and 600E are somewhat similar I would have thought that it should easily work. Also margi does list the support for 600E thinkpads. It is 600X that needs only a WDM driver with NeoMagic 4 Megs video card, but because of Pentium 3 processor most likely one wouldn't need one annyway in that case.

If you weren't able to get the WDM driver I could upload it for you. The driver for XP was never written but 2000 WDM driver works fine. Occasionaly I would get PCMCIA_UNKNOWN_MANUFACTURER comes up as found new hardware but all I have to do is reinsert the Margi card. That's about the only problem I can think of with this card and the standby issue.

Other than that it does work fine with most of the DVD's. Once I got the same problem you have with no sound, but for the most part it is the only way I can play DVD's on this machine.

Hopefully you could give it a try one more time.

EDIT: Here I uploaded the driver, but two things to keep in mind.

I am using wireless, hopefully the download/upload won't be corrupt - I can only think of rapidshare as host.
I don't use a virus scanner on this pc that I am on right now, but I am firewalled and I don't care if I get infected.

Note: I am not sure if their website was hard to navigate through and what not, but I did get this from their website as an official driver for Windows 2000. I think you do have this installed but there is something missing in terms of having sound.

I remembered that I had to open Margi DVD player once and increase the volume in THAT application first and then it worked in Windows media player.

http://rapidshare.com/files/6777062/Mar ... r.zip.html

O.K., I've just got back from a two week vacation in the caribbean, and my 600E performed flawlesly for wireless internet at the airports and resort where we stayed.(I use a d-link card).It was great logging on instantly while other folks were struggling with there new laptops with inegrated wireless and not being able to log on without my help, and were surprised when they found out how old my machine was.
After turning off all un-needed programs like anti-virus and spyware blocker, the DVD player performed quite well., we watched movies to pass the time on and between flights. I guess the bottom line is if you want to play dvd's on your 600E, it doesn't matter which OS your using, as long as it isn't loaded down with any other tasks to bog it down.

jruschme, my opinion is that you should try running XP. It should have better flash support than 98se. I did find that XP ran much better than 98se on my two 600e's -- in fact I never even attempted loading 98se on the second one.

That said, you need to trim XP for faster loading and get rid of all non-essential tasks. Search the net for tips on "trimming XP" and/or "speed up XP". There are lots of little things you can do to make it run much smoother on a hardware limited machine. Once you do get it setup right, and before you load much (if any) software, make an image of the HD!! One of the tweaks you can do is eliminating the splash screen. Under certain "crash" conditions the machine will go into a loop -- starting to boot then reboot and start over right when it should be starting. With no splash screen you can't see what's going on. I have an HP with that problem right now. Need to try booting into safe mode", and if that fails will have to use a floppy or the XP CD. the splash screen would show an error right before reboot.

This is a minor inconvenience, I still eliminate the splash screen to speed boot up. It's rare that not having it is a problem, just good advice to have a backup of a working installation in case you do have a problem later. I gave one of my 600e's away to someone in another country. I made "ghost" images of the sytem without software (one CD) and with software (three CDs) installed as well as a copy of XP to send with it -- just in case!

Hi !

Another nice topic :

http://www.neowin.net/forum/lofiversion ... 35571.html

W.