In article <4738c772$1@news2.actrix.gen.nz>,
~misfit~ <misfitnz@yahoot.com.au> wrote:

Patrick Vervoorn wrote:

Finally turned out the Seagte HD I had in the system didn't support
Native Command Queueing, while the NVidia SATA drivers did. Swapping
out the Seagate for a WDC RAID edition drive solved this, finally.

Surely you could have just disabled NCQ until such time as you had a SATA II 
HDD? Buying a new HDD seems a little extreme as far as solving the problem 
goes. There should be an option for backward-compatability with older, SATA 
I drives.

It was a  totally new system, so the shop I bought it from exchanged the 
Seagate 300GB for a WDC 300GB RAID edition drive with no questions asked.

It simply took a while before I figured out it was NCQ that was messing 
things up; I first noticed the system had no problems when I used the 
standard Microsoft IDE drivers. Then made a Ghost image of that state. 
Then started experimenting around with installing NVidia drivers, etc, 
until I found out I could get the system stable with the NVidia SATA 
drivers installed, but by manually disabling NCQ.

However, since I fully expected NCQ to work, and the shop agreed with me, 
they suggested I'd try a WDC drive. That one worked flawlessly, so I later 
returned the Seagate drive to them.

[Crysis]

Something my mother told me, don't be seduced by looks alone. <g>

I'd have to see what the gameplay was like as well.

Gameplay is wonderful. Although it's still on rails (as most single player 
games are), the 'arenas' are so expanded, that you have a lot of choice on 
how to approach a certain problem/nasty situation.

You _are_ running a Glide Wrapper? I recently had to switch back to
the Direct3D API for Diablo II, when the NVidia 169.01 and 169.04
broke the OpenGL stuff in such a way that the Glide Wrapper stopped
working. I found the Direct3D version of the game to feel much, much
'clunkier' than the game in Glide. Difficult to describe, but
everything seemed to run/animate/move much 'coarser'... So if you
haven't already....?

Twice I've been prompted to try Sven's Glide Wrapper, usually due to your 
mentioning it. However, I've never had it work for me for some reason. 
Perhaps if I try again....

Perhaps try an older version if the newest one isn't working for you. I'm 
running the 1.3 version on one system (P4-1700/Ti4200), while I'm using 
the latest 1.4 on the Q6600/8800GTX system.

Also keep an eye on the NVidia drivers you're using. The latest WHQL ones 
work fine, the 169.0x betas had major problems.

Regards,

Patrick.