Good PC build to run Whistler/Longhorn?

[Sim31]

I've always had bad moments with ATI cards on Whistler, as the drivers for them never worked.

If you're planning to run Beta 2 (2428-ish period), stick with NVIDIA or Matrox. These pretty much work out of the box and don't BSOD like ATI cards do.

Update: I purchased awhile back a ATi Radeon 9000 64MB that I found locally for $10, I thought I would give it a try with the Whistler builds, upon getting finished with installation and booting to desktop, the drivers were not there out of the box probably considering the card was slightly newer after whistlers time, I found some compatible drivers however, they are finicky at best, one build which I can't remember right off hand after installing the driver, BSOD. I am thinking of checking out a nvidia card or Matrox and see how that goes.

Should I keep the ATI Radeon one for later builds for whistler or maybe perhaps longhorn builds? Hoping the longhorn builds go smooth sailing without a hitch and at least get Aero working right off hand.

Also for everyone, since I am messing with the desktops, im going to try to look at perhaps maybe getting a laptop, I have been finding some old ones local here that owners are wanting to part with. What brands would you all recommend and models? Im going to look and see what I can get, going to possibly do the same thing as with the desktops. Going preferably for Longhorn and below OS wise, Whistler, even, 2000,ME,98 builds. I want to add at least one laptop to the old desktop PC's I have.

[MCpillager12]

I've always had bad moments with ATI cards on Whistler, as the drivers for them never worked.

If you're planning to run Beta 2 (2428-ish period), stick with NVIDIA or Matrox. These pretty much work out of the box and don't BSOD like ATI cards do.

Should I keep the ATI Radeon one for later builds for whistler or maybe perhaps longhorn builds? Hoping the longhorn builds go smooth sailing without a hitch and at least get Aero working right off hand.

Keep it for longhorn.

[DarkerJ]

I've always had bad moments with ATI cards on Whistler, as the drivers for them never worked.

If you're planning to run Beta 2 (2428-ish period), stick with NVIDIA or Matrox. These pretty much work out of the box and don't BSOD like ATI cards do.

Update: I purchased awhile back a ATi Radeon 9000 64MB that I found locally for $10, I thought I would give it a try with the Whistler builds, upon getting finished with installation and booting to desktop, the drivers were not there out of the box probably considering the card was slightly newer after whistlers time, I found some compatible drivers however, they are finicky at best, one build which I can't remember right off hand after installing the driver, BSOD. I am thinking of checking out a nvidia card or Matrox and see how that goes.

Should I keep the ATI Radeon one for later builds for whistler or maybe perhaps longhorn builds? Hoping the longhorn builds go smooth sailing without a hitch and at least get Aero working right off hand.

Also for everyone, since I am messing with the desktops, im going to try to look at perhaps maybe getting a laptop, I have been finding some old ones local here that owners are wanting to part with. What brands would you all recommend and models? Im going to look and see what I can get, going to possibly do the same thing as with the desktops. Going preferably for Longhorn and below OS wise, Whistler, even, 2000,ME,98 builds. I want to add at least one laptop to the old desktop PC's I have.

The Radeon 9000 is pretty decent, should keep it for XP. As for the GPU for Whistler, again try a RIVA TNT2 or Geforce2.

[MCpillager12]

I know its been 4 months, but if you're trying to get into gaming on post reset Longhorn I recommend a 8800GT or X1950XTX, however good luck trying to find the ATI option as that is rare.

[The_Build_Tester]

This is a very late reply, however if you are going to do any Longhorn machine, it should be something like a Pentium 4, or a Pentium D just to get the best experience out of slow and buggy builds. GPUs are bit interesting, some people have used the GeForce 4... series, or in my case I used the FX 5200 in some Longhorn builds and they are natively supported in Longhorn without any other driver installations, builds pre-LDDM will install the XPDM driver in which you have to make aero work with the registry modifications, builds LDDM or later will automatically enable aero using the LDDM driver which is the case for all the builds I've tried on my Dell Dimension 4600 with an FX 5200. I have also used an X1300 and x1600PRO on the same machine, iirc the x1300 was the last card I tested on Longhorn and it was actually pre-LDDM which didn't work at all even after installing the XPDM driver (since this isn't a native card), but installed the LDDM drivers on build 5270 (the ATi LDDM drivers that I found archived on a website) which had performance and stability issues.

I think if you're going to go with any GPU consider the FX 5200 (pre-LDDM) or x1300 (x1300 for LDDM-post builds)
Any natively supported GPU in WinXP should be just fine in Longhorn/Vista betas
You could probably export a list somehow from WinXP or Longhorn, the natively supported cards are you best bet just because they will probably be more reliable.

[DVINTHEHOUSEMAN]

I know there is probably no drivers for 2000/Whistler for this PC but I would recommend the HP Compaq dc 7000 SFF series of computers

[Schneider616]

I honestly used a Radeon 9550 256MB for Longhorn. Worked fine, had driver support.

Machine was a P4 2.8E GHz (Northwood-512) SL6PF, 4x512MB, Gecube R9550GU2-D3 256MB, 80GB WDC WD800JB SATA HDD.

[Sim31]

Been awhile since I stopped back by in this topic. Thank you all for the replies, keep them coming in as im still trying to log what graphics cards work and what doesn't. Now this will be maybe alittle tougher on what im about to ask but lets jump to the laptop side of things...

What laptop make/models are best suited for Longhorn Pre-reset? Whistler? and lets go ahead and throw in Post reset also. Looking to see what the top picks would be on what brand/model is most best suited with the least amount of problems and graphics card that would work with no problems.... well almost no problems with Longhorn.

[DVINTHEHOUSEMAN]

Thinkpad T23. Great laptop. Very reliable. Sat out in a garage for 5 years (idk why it was out there) and i brought it inside, plugged it in, hit the power button and it turned on. Booted up to Windows XP without a problem. Works great with XP, just takes a little bit to load Firefox 43. Other than that it works great. Idk what games or programs you intend to run on it, if any. Now for longhorn you should be able to use a laptop compatible with/designed for windows xp or vista. It really all depends on the performance you expect out of it.

[leppy232]

As far as I can tell, the Dell Inspiron 2200 and Whistler 241x are not very fond of each other. 2600 works just fine though, so Longhorn may be a good bet.