If you thought Tom's sucked before, wait till you read this....

[lecter]

It's unbelievable, what started out as an OK article turned itself into a catastrophy:

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/02q3/020928/howto-02.html

I haven't read further and I deleted this shitty site from my Favorites, it is unacceptable to be the most read hardware site on the Internet and to have such horrid mistakes in an article...1066FSB, SiS with SDRAM, 5400rpm hdd for video editing, and the list goes on....it may have been written by a reader, but this is just F*CKED UP!!

P.S. Check out who the moron who wrote the article is:

Jim Tomlinson joined Intel in 1986 as a design engineer after he retired from the U.S. Air Force. During his 12 years with Intel, he designed desktop and laptop motherboards for OEMs. He also worked on several special projects with microcontrollers. One of the special projects was the digitization of analog video to playback on a PC from a CD-ROM in 1990! In 1997, Jim went to work for Citibank in New York where he was working on putting a secure Internet communication device for banking transactions into a multichip module.

[Admiral]

I chose the MSI G4Ti4200 video card solely because Tom's Hardware Guide used it in a couple of their tests.

What do you expect when he can kiss a$s so good.

[KRSESQ]

He is a Jolly Joker. Trying to format a drive bigger than 32 gigs with FAT 32 in Win2K Someone should tell him its not supported...

His drive choice is "okay." I'm not sure I'd rely on it for Huff YUV (although it would prolly work better than what I've got now )

Kevin

[Joel]

Trying to format a drive bigger than 32 gigs with FAT 32 in Win2K

Is that a specific limitation of W2K???? The reason I asked is that I have formated both a 40GB and 80GB under WinME and they are under WinXP with FAT32.

Joel

[Wombat]

Yes, I think. I know that in WinXP I couldn't format large partitions as FAT32, it forces NTFS.

[KRSESQ]

They recognize FAT32 drives bigger than 32 gigs, they just don't format them as such.

What I'd like to know is how the hell did he use MSDOS to transfer files to an NTFS drive? Last I checked, MSDOS doesn't recognise NTFS at all.

Kevin

[Admiral]

There are some utilities out there that can help you, one such is NTFSDOS Pro by Sysinternals.

I've only used the NTFS for Windows 98 utility (read only).

[DGhost]

some quotes i liked out of it...

1:20 PM - The Gigabyte motherboard has four IDE connectors, two ATA-33/66/100 connectors and two ATA-133/RAID connectors. The Promise RAID controller 20276 chip drives the latter two connectors, labeled as IDE3 and IDE4. The BIOS allows you to set the Promise RAID controller as an ATA or RAID interface. But I didn't know if the BIOS could be set up to boot from any drive connected to IDE3/4. I set the jumpers on the two Maxtor drives to "cable-select," and used the 80-pin flat-ribbon cable to daisy chain interconnect the two drives to the IDE3 connector. The system powered up fine. BIOS recognized both drives, and I found out that the first drive (at the end of the IDE3 cable) can be set as a boot device. Thank you, Gigabyte! I love it!

2:00 PM - I found that the ATX_12V plug from the power supply wasn't connected to the motherboard. According to Gigabyte's documentation, this should have prevented the system from starting up. I plugged it in. The system still started up just fine.

2:40 PM - I traced out the USB connector cables coming from the front panel and tried to figure out how to connect them to the motherboard. I actually grabbed an ohmmeter and ohmed out the connection. Once I was sure I had it correct, I plugged in the cables. When I unplugged them to take pictures of them, I found their markings on the other side of the connectors! Boy, that was a waste of time!

3:30 PM - In order to start the installation of Windows 2000, I had to change the boot order in the BIOS settings. Once that was done, I booted from the Windows 2000 CD. Oops, but which one? There are two CDs in the MS Windows 2000 package. A CD labeled "Step-by-step," and the one called "Windows 2000." Oh, and the little manual that Microsoft enclosed with the CDs ASSUMES the manufacturer has already installed the operating system, so it begins with the Windows Setup Wizard. Thanks, Microsoft. After inserting the "Step-by-step" CD, I quickly learned it was NOT bootable.

uhh... so... never installed a copy of a microsoft operating system off of a real disk since before Windows 95, eh?

10:15 AM - Next, I used MS-DOS to copy the 500 MB from Drive E: to Drive C:. That took 17.5 seconds, for a transfer rate of 30.6 MB/sec. Not bad for an ATA-33/66/100 interface.

10:30 AM - To confirm these figures, I used MS-DOS to copy a 4 GB file from a CD in Drive D: to the hard disk Maxtor Drive E: in 1277 seconds, for a transfer rate of 2.8 MB/sec. Then I copied the same files from Drive E: to Drive C: in 164 seconds, for a transfer rate of 25.5 MB/sec -- still pretty close to the ATA-33 maximum speed of 33 MB/sec.

so, uhh, a CD holds 4 gb... and DOS has been a bad place to do disk transfer checks as by default it doesn't enable disk/write caching or DMA modes, unless the bios does it for you. some drives do perform a lot worse in DOS than in Windows.

there are other funny things in the article... oh well...

[ZokesPro]

Tom is only good for his Tech news. The rest is crap pretty much.

[Technoid]

Well,
you can always read the articles and feel that mixed feeling of horror and luaghter

[Paddy]

It never fails to make me smile.

I take most things i read with a pinch of salt...

[Paddy]

NTFSDOS has saved my bacon many a time... A very handy app, although i too have only ever used the free read-only ver