Win on a HP Pavilion ZE4360

Last updated: 16.07.2003, by Bernhard Steiner, mailto:steiner@it-cockpit.de

Even if I don't like it very much, for some applications (or better: games ) I can't do it with no Windows at all. Some small annotations on running M$ Windows on this notebook:
  • After having tried to run Windows 2000 on this notebook, I went back to the preinstalled version of Windows XP home, because the driver support for Win2000 is still very very unstable and drivers are rare! If you find a driver e.g. for the graphics chip (I used the reference driver directly from ATI), at least this works in principal but the speed and the 3d acceleration is very poor. After having played around a bit, I decided to go back to XP, because there exist already performance-optimized drivers.
  • My variant of the HP Pavilion has the AMD Athlon 2400+ XP mobility CPU which effectivly runs at 1.8 GHz. If you examine the bus clock with a utility like WCPUID and you don't get a speed of 1789 MHz (or something slightly different), but an apparently lower bus clock (e.g. 1060 MHz), this is because of the power saving facilities of the AMD mobile CPU. In the general Windows power saving settings choose the option "Always on" and the cpu won't go into this slower but less power consuming mode.
  • Graphics performance under WinXP is quite OK, it could be better especially for games that rely on a high 3d acceleration. The shared memory (from 16 MB up to 128 MB) gives you a fine option to tune the amount you want to reserve for graphics but naturally it isn't as fast as a dedicated video memory would be. In order to be able to really play games you should at least have 512 MB RAM.

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© 2004 Bernhard Steiner