Dell Precision Workstation 610 and Windows 2000

Update: After getting all sorts of emails regarding this article, its really time to set the record straight. So from the beginning; this was written back in 1999 as some light relief from some horrible work loads in the lead up to the Y2K “Nightmare”.

And yes I know Windows 2000 is no longer Microsoft latest anything, but remember when this was written. Anyways these days I do little with windows, much preferring to live in the UNIX/Mac world, so cannot help with any windows problems.

Finally, Dell support here in OZ, which used to be “world class”, has been outsourced to call centers in various parts of the world, and has nose-dived from its previous heights to something to be avoided at all costs.

Oops almost forgot, these days I avoid anything that claims to be made by dell. This is personal preference; being based on some very expensive experiences with both laptops and desktop machines, plus some “interesting” encounters with Dell support and sales call centers.

All that said, as always I do welcome constructive feedback

Today’s challenge, to get Microsoft's latest "Marvel" to run on my dual Xeon Dell workstation, its been running on my ThinkPad 600 with only very minimal pain for a while now, and I really wanted to be able to use the USB video camera on a machine with more grunt.

The big problem, nothing apart from the base machine, yes I mean the motherboard and CDROM, is on the Microsoft hardware wish list, not the video card, Creative MPEG decoder, and most definitely not the array controller, more on that head ache later.

The Internet beckons, first port of call being Dells web site, thinking there must be drivers for at least the video card and array controller as both were purchased directly from Dell. Big mistake, no sign of anything useful, sure there where files available for Windows 2000 professional but nothing useful here, OK thought of calling them as the support they offer is excellent, but decided against it thinking I would leave that for the last resort, they would get the "helllpppp" call when the world started to fall apart or my Internet connection failed.

Next stop the tale of two drivers

The main problem was always going to be the Array controller, an Adaptec ARO-1130CA that I obtained from Dell just after getting the machine, in the never-ending quest for disk speed. In the past I have asked the vendors support group here, about windows 2000 support, to be told its still being looked into, anyway I digress, first place to start is the Adaptec web site, digging through the support pages I found the right page and sure enough there was a beta driver available for my card "success at last", err well no, a BIOS upgrade was needed for this driver to work, OK so its time to download that.

So after downloading the new BIOS, and reading the instructions, it said something like uncompress these files onto a bootable DOS disk, which it turns out is more of a problem that it sounds, think about it where do you get a DOS disk from in these days of NT and windows 9x, I was hoping the archive I had just downloaded was a bootable floppy image, no such luck in this case.

This sent me digging into the piles of junk looking for anything bootable, it took a while, said junk piles are large and growing by the day. Anyway finally found a DOS disk, "why bother" I hear you say "Just use a Windows 95 start-up disk", from personal pain the only thing I would ever trust with a BIOS upgrade of any type is plain old DOS.

With DOS disk in hand back to the today’s problem, first making a copy of this valuable bootable disk, got the Adaptec files onto it. Booting the system with this disk, the first surprise, a message that told me the "detected hardware" was a ARO1130U2 and I needed driver disk 'A', which is nice of it, saved me waiting time downloading the unneeded disk B.

Now this revelation was a real surprise as the system when it boots up displayed ARO1130xA and a physical look at the card showed a ARO-1130CA, anyway the upgrade seemed to be happy with the card so I told it to go and do its worse, all went through with zero problems, Now when it boots up the array controller BIOS claims to be 'ARO-1130', interesting, maybe one day I will ask Adaptec what this actually means.

After all this it seems I actually have not only a newer BIOS but a totally different card, its working so will not complain. Armed with the new card type and the requirement for driver disk A, its back to the Adaptec web site to make sure the drivers would work, thought it safer to go look rather than risk it. From this point things actually got better, seems that there is a released driver for my new card, so started the download and went to lunch.

A while later, and feeling brave again..

The next vital driver I needed was for the Intergraph video card, having already looked at the Dell web site and finding nothing, I headed for Intergraph, this was actually a pleasure, took under 5 minutes to find and download the driver. Now armed with all the drivers needed to install the basic system, time to worry about the other drivers later, as I could live without some things but not disks and video, on a machine that is used mainly for graphics work.

Now with windows 2000 CD and a pile of driver floppies, in hand, time for the install its self. Starting the install was simple, just boot the CD and follow the on-screen instructions, which in this case are an improvement on NT4 where you had to press F6 to install array controller drivers from vendors disk, without any on screen prompting, you just had to know about it, if you where lucky its in the driver documentation, failing that mind reading etc. No longer, now it asks you with a prompt, well done on that improvement Bill.

Anyway the Adaptec driver loaded without problems, which was a relief after the pain I had with NT4 and the same controller. Another improvement was the bootable CD now sits there and waits for you to press a key before booting, failing a key press it times out to the hard disk, now that’s nice, fixes a real irritating problem that used to drive me nuts with NT4, where the install looped if you left the CD in the drive. Now just boot the CD answer a few questions and walk away.

Now the next problem, or should I say irritation, when the install process switches from text to graphical, its runs at 640x480 at 60Hz which on a 21 inch monitor was very painful, gets worse there seems to be no way to install a third party video driver during the install. Note that one Bill. On this machine the installation took about 15 minutes from start to finish, which was a pleasant change.

Once the installation claimed it had finished, logged in to make sure all was OK, but no two reboots later it decided it was going to allow me to get in and change the video driver, which in its self was a simple mater of starting the device manager from control panel and updating a driver. Now feeling good and relieved all was working, its time to change some of the default settings, you know the ones, hide file extensions, files etc, and turn off all the new features provided to make your desktop hard to use -:).

Thankfully finding most of these is not as hard as with some of the early beta versions, now its a right mouse button for the most irritating of them all the "transition effects" on menus etc, really drives me nuts, I want a screen that just snaps menus up. Then its into control panel to disable all the web features of the desktop, and to change the view options to show everything, plus a few other settings, in all about 10 minutes. Now, on a roll, its time for the creative labs DXR2 card.

Heard all sorts of horror stories about this card with Windows 2000 and NT in general, personally I have had no problems at all on any of the OS I have actually installed it. First stop the creative lab web site; they have a nice simple search engine for drivers, which have saved me many times. The results of this search where they do not have a native windows 2000 driver, but did have a WDM driver that claims to work.

All my past experience with WDM has been bad, bearing this in mind and not wanting to start from scratch, took a ghost image of the installation, heavily compressed onto another machine. Now feeling safe that I could always go back to a working system, I updated the 'other devices' entry in device manager with the new DXR2 WDM driver, to my surprise it did not ask for a reboot, which is yet another improvement over NT4.

The final thing to do was a test for the DVD playback, I dropped a local DVD disk into the drive, a pioneer SCSI 6x, and the windows 2000 player popped up and complained about the region code being wrong, which apart from being irritating was actually in this case not true.

At this point I started to get that sinking feeling, and the restore from the ghost image was looking like a lifesaver, but not right now. With nothing to lose, the last try was the creative labs player software, which I had until now dismissed, as its years old, not having been updated since 98. Anyway I loaded it and gave it the reboot it asked for. To my surprise everything worked, the same DVD played first time, the whole system seems to be stable and my stress level has dropped somewhat.

Copyright David K. Watson, 1999