Jack Carr

This is a good post/observation. Looking at this from the Axis point of view, the German big cats, Tiger and Panther, have HE that is also high velocity. Does the high velocity of the HE round equate to a penetration or is it, as so many have already pointed out in this thread, outer structural damage?

Nothing besides CM. I was playing Diablo II for a bit but only CMBB and CMAK now.

If anyone is interested, I just RMA'd the second DFI board back to ZIPZOOMFLY. I think DFI has some quality control issues. I'm going to try a Chaintech mainboard with the same chipset, NForce2.

Thanks for the info. I just checked out the DFI board that I ordered and it does have the MCP-T chipset. I have a pretty good soundcard, Creative Labs 5.1 Soundblaster Gamer card. Is the onboard sound better than what the Creative Labs card can provide?

Just heard from ZIPZOOMFLY. They tested the motherboard I RMA'd back to them and it was, in fact, defective. Makes me feel a bit better anyway. I should have the new one early next week. If that's DOA I'll flip. Hopefully they will let me exchange it for a different brand mainboard.

I am also in the process of such an upgrade. I am getting rid of an ASUS A7V8X and going to a DFI Infinity Ultra II with the same chipset that you mention, NForce2. I purchased not only the mainboard but a brand new Western Digital hard drive as well. The DFI board was dead on arrival. My reasons for upgrading were different from yours but the moral of my story is, "Stay away from DFI boards." After my nightmare of the DOA board, I started to do some research on this particular board and found that the DOA problem I experienced was not uncommon with this particular DFI board and DFI boards in general. I also found in a few reviews on NEWEGG.com that this board has a hard time seeing Western Digital hard drives. "Woe is me!" Anyone out there have a DFI motherboard with a success story? I need a "pick me up". As usual, Schrullenhaft's words of wisdom ring true. The only thing I can say is that Windows XP is a very stable operating system. I have two machines that are running XP Pro and I love it. Well...scratch that. I have one machine. I am waiting for a fully functional DFI Infinity Ultra II motherboard to get the second machine up and running. Please hurry up ZIPZOOMFLY! Thanks everyone. [ April 16, 2004, 09:49 AM: Message edited by: Jack Carr ]

Yeah that's what it was alright. That Symantec Event Manager is murder! If you want to add two minutes or more to your PC boot-up time just enable that service. It's a peach!

Bump! Hope some of you can be helped by this. It really makes a difference when your machine boots up quickly like its supposed to.

Good Ones! Yeah!

This happened to me last night with a late model Stug IV against several Shermans, some 75MM and some 76MM, in CMAK. The Stug had great position but must have decided that it was outnumbered. I kept sending it back in but it kept seeing more than one enemy vehicle and backing off. Only on occassion would it take a shot before popping smoke and reversing out.

SUCCESS! This was the key. Not only did I see potential problems under Application but also under System in the event viewer. There were several services that were taking a long time to boot up. I looked for those services and found that I had them set to Manual load. I set them to AUtomatic and gave that a try. No luck. Then I went back in and Disabled those services. SUCCESS! 45-50 Second Boot-Up. Thanks Frenchy. This immediately showed me what services were not coming up quickly. The problem services in my case were Symantec Event Manager and Symantec Password Validation. Everything else was coming up immediately except these two services. Thanks to all who posted. To those of you still having a problem, take a look at Frenchy's post and see what services are delayed in coming up. If you can stand to disable those services your boot-up might just be positively affected. God Bless!

That sounds promising. I'll definitely give that a try. Thanks

Thanks for the suggestions. RAM should be the easiest thing you mentioned. The slow-boot machine has three 512MB modules. I certainly could swap the video cards. They are the same card but a different make, the fast-boot up machines card is a Chaintech while the other slow-boot machines card is a Jaton. This shouldn't really make a difference as both cards are Nvidia GeForce Ti4600 128MB 4X AGP. Currently, both are using the same exact driver as well. I'll try some of these things this weekend.

I do use Windows Update on both machines. Both are up to date. Whatever Microsoft has thrown out for Windows XP Pro I've got it on both rigs. It's a real puzzler...

Just a side by side for those following this thread. I have two machines, nearly identical. Here are the specs for both: Machine A ASUS A7V8X AMD Athlon XP 2700+ (2.17ghz Thoroughbred Core) Kingston 1.5GB DDR PC2100 RAM GeForce Ti4600 128MB 4X AGP Creative Labs SoundBlaster 5.1 Gamer Sound Card Maxtor 60GB 7200RPM 2MB Cache Hard drive Windows XP Pro CD-ROM 52X CD-RW Floppy Drive (BOOT UP TIME - 2 Minutes 45 seconds) Machine B ASUS A7V8X AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (2.25ghz Thoroughbred Core) Kingston 1GB DDR PC2700 RAM GeForce Ti4600 128MB 4X AGP Creative Labs SoundBlaster 5.1 Gamer Sound Card Western Digital 80GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache Hard Drive Windows XP Pro CD-RW DVD/CD-RW Floppy (BOOT-UP TIME 50 Seconds) The funny thing is, Machine A used to beat Machine B's boot-up time by 5 seconds! Now it gets beat by 2 minutes 5 seconds!

Does the AI just decide outright that this vehicle or that gun will be destroyed if the means to do so are present on the battlefield? Please tell me it ain't so!

Thanks. I will look at upgrading to the official release of the video driver. I have not tried booting up in safe mode yet. What will this tell me? MSCONFIG is clean as far as what is loading up. I have BOOTVIS and have used it. Doesn't really tell me much but I'll admit I'm not sure what to look at as far as that software is concerned. My honest opinion is that it is one of two things: 1) Registry bloat - as Schrullenhaft suggested 2) Motherboard on the fritz I have always suspected that the motherboard was dying a slow death whose first symptom was a slow boot-up. I was considering upgrading my other machines motherboard to one with a 333mhz bus. Perhaps this would be a good excuse. Both of my machines have an ASUS A7V8X motherboard at the same BIOS revision level. Easy swap and then my better machine gets a quicker motherboard. I'll see how long I can live with the 2 minute 45 second boot-up before I pull the trigger on this one though. Thanks to everyone for coming to my aid on this.

I'll check the capacitors on the board. Actually, the PC is not that new. Built from components over several years. The motherboard is an ASUS A7V8X, older board. I'll take a look at the board to see if any of the capacitors look strange. As far as Norton goes, I have read that Norton Anti-Virus has caused certain slow boot-ups on some machines. I'm thinking about removing it entirely and seeing how things boot-up then. Thanks for the advice.

Applied these mods to CMBB last night. Fantastic! Much, much better than the stock bases. Gotta love the detail! If your machine can handle it, it adds so much to the visual. Thanks again.

My Nvidia drivers are 56.55. The driver I have is not the official release version. I have no problems with video whatsoever. What driver version do you have?

Nothing autoloading on boot. I've pretty much stripped that stuff out so as not to take up unnecessary system resources. I'll check again to make sure. I do have a few USB devices plugged into it. Scanner and printer as well as the APC battery backup. I'll unplug these and see if things improve. I haven't really installed too much since those wonderful 45 second boot-up days. I upgraded the processor from a AMD XP 2400+ to a AMD XP 2700+. A slight increase in horsepower but not much. I also upgraded the power supply from a 300 watt to a 430 watt. The slow boot-up was occurring before I did these two upgrades though. The hardware that I used to upgrade this machine came from another machine I had that I upgraded. I did recently hook my two machines together via cat5 into a hub, 3COM NIC cards, shared hard drives. A little head-to-head Combat Mission set-up. Again, the slow-boot-up was occurring before I networked the machines. I'll check out the tool that you referred to and try all of these things. Hopefully I'll be able to get to it tonight. One other thing I aught to mention, The machine still comes up to the Windows XP Desktop in 45-50 seconds and it appears as though it's ready to rock but if you click on something, anything, it just kinda hangs for the aforementioned 2 extra minutes and then the "Welcome to the Wonderful World of Windows XP" music graces my speakers. Then it executes everything that I've been clicking on in a fast, catch-up fashion. I'll let you know how I make out. Thanks... </font>

This looks really good. I downloaded this and will be applying it this evening to take a look. I've always felt that one of you talented modders should take a crack at making the tree bases look more natural. Hi-Res mods baby! Yeah! Detail kills!

Nothing autoloading on boot. I've pretty much stripped that stuff out so as not to take up unnecessary system resources. I'll check again to make sure. I do have a few USB devices plugged into it. Scanner and printer as well as the APC battery backup. I'll unplug these and see if things improve. I haven't really installed too much since those wonderful 45 second boot-up days. I upgraded the processor from a AMD XP 2400+ to a AMD XP 2700+. A slight increase in horsepower but not much. I also upgraded the power supply from a 300 watt to a 430 watt. The slow boot-up was occurring before I did these two upgrades though. The hardware that I used to upgrade this machine came from another machine I had that I upgraded. I did recently hook my two machines together via cat5 into a hub, 3COM NIC cards, shared hard drives. A little head-to-head Combat Mission set-up. Again, the slow-boot-up was occurring before I networked the machines. I'll check out the tool that you referred to and try all of these things. Hopefully I'll be able to get to it tonight. One other thing I aught to mention, The machine still comes up to the Windows XP Desktop in 45-50 seconds and it appears as though it's ready to rock but if you click on something, anything, it just kinda hangs for the aforementioned 2 extra minutes and then the "Welcome to the Wonderful World of Windows XP" music graces my speakers. Then it executes everything that I've been clicking on in a fast, catch-up fashion. I'll let you know how I make out. Thanks...

Posting to see if anyone has run into this problem. My machine: AMD AThlon XP 2700+ 2.17ghz 1.5GB RAM PC2100 GeForce Ti4600 128MB 4X AGP Maxtor 60GB Hard Drive 7200RPM 2MB cache Creative Labs Sound Blaster Gamer 5.1 Windows XP Pro with all the latest updates courtesy of Microsoft APC Battery backup connected via USB Running Norton Anti-Virus with Auto Protect turned Off This machine used to boot-up in 45 seconds flat but now it takes 2 minutes 45 seconds to boot-up. I'm at a loss... I've emptied out the TEMP directory I've looked for Spyware using Spyhunter I've run Defrag and Chkdsk I've checked for viruses/trojans using Norton and Stinger software Still boots up slow. After it comes up it screams but it takes a long time to boot up. Didn't used to so I'm guessing something happened along the way. Your suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance!

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