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Windows 2000 and mid-2000s Dell woes

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First post, by aderius

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Hi all,

I bought a Dell XPS 600 locally and installed Windows 2000 on it w/ SP4.

Pentium D 3.0 ghz
GeForce 6800 GTX 256mb
2gb RAM
Mobo has an nforce4 chipset (Nvidia CK804)
Corsair 512 gb SSD w/ StarTech SATA-to-IDE adapter
REMOVED

Running into two issues:

1. Device manager does not list the GPU, which is a Geforce 7800 GTX. Running hwinfo on this PC detects it fine. I found a random thread suggesting to change the computer type to "standard PC" and voila - it's now detected. As I understand it, there are some downsides to using this method. Is there any workaround? The BIOS is pretty sparse as far as options go.

2. I get intermittent "disk read error" on boot. I ran repair through W2K CD, but ultimately, turning off computer, waiting a few seconds, and turning it back on again often lets it boot into Windows just fine.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Last edited by DosFreak on 2025-06-22, 18:14. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 4, by GemCookie

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aderius wrote on 2025-06-22, 15:18:

Running into two issues:

1. Device manager does not list the GPU, which is a Geforce 7800 GTX.

If no driver is installed, the card naturally won't show up in the Device Manager.

Running hwinfo on this PC detects it fine. I found a random thread suggesting to change the computer type to "standard PC" and voila - it's now detected. As I understand it, there are some downsides to using this method.

Indeed, Windows 2000 can only use one CPU thread with the Standard PC HAL. Software power-off won't work either.

Is there any workaround? The BIOS is pretty sparse as far as options go.

Have you installed chipset drivers?

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Reply 2 of 4, by aderius

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I have installed the chipset drivers, yes! There are still a lot of generic listings under system devices, not sure if that's to be expected

Reply 3 of 4, by DosFreak

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So called "abandonware" is not supported here.
Removed name of modified Microsoft OS used so that it can't be searched for from the op post and downloaded from a certain site.

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Reply 4 of 4, by aderius

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UPDATE: I just gave up. Compatibility is a headache with this system even with drivers and SP4. I found no way to have Windows recognize the existance of the video card unless I changed it to "standard PC", which in turn caused other compatibility issues. Went to XP, no issues.

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