Hacks and Gadgets by HJL

Another note from getting Windows 2000 running on an old computer. I had an ancient Diamond Stealth II S220 PCI card in the closet, and this particular motherboard doesn’t have integrated video. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to locate Windows 2000 drivers for this particular video card.

However, it turns out that there are reference implementation drivers for the Rendition Verite V2100/V2200 graphics chip that work on Windows 2000.

Wikipedia article on Rendition, the Verite graphics processor, and its use in Diamond Stealth S220.

Here is where I found a useable Windows 2000 driver for the Diamond Stealth S220 / Rendition Verite.

Warning - this driver is a little unstable. The original poster reports:

DISCLAIMER: I am unsure of the quality of this driver, my computer can sometimes be unstable and will randomly freeze or hang: suddenly the mouse will not move anymore and the keyboard doesn’t respond. Sometimes a pattern comes up on the screen and sometimes everything looks fine but nothing works. The machine still replies to a ping when this happens, but won’t accept any network connections. So something is wrong, it could be this driver or it could be something else dodgy in my computer. Try it and see, I would be really interested to know how everybody else goes with this.

There may be other drivers available from the registration- subscription- and fee-based driver sites. Interestingly, at least one site gives you the option of viewing a lot of ads instead of registering for access to their driver library. I tried this, but it turned out that the last page redirect after all the ads goes to a non-existent page.

This weekend, I’ve been doing a clean install of Windows 2000 on an old computer, starting with original Windows 2000, then the SP4 rollup, then running Windows Update to load all the miscellaneous patches.

Unfortunately, on a clean install of Win2K followed by SP4 (which tightened the security model), Windows Update won’t work, as it want to install and use the updated BITS service. The symptoms are that it will try to install, then report that the installation failed.

After a lengthy search online, here are the two steps that appear to fix it (worked for me):

1. Make sure that “Microsoft Client for Networks” is one of the installed services for the network adapter. I started out with just TCP/IP. I’m not completely convinced that this is needed, but it was mentioned in a few places.

2. In the User Administration control panel, add Administrator (or the account you’re using to update from) to the Backup Operators group.

After making these two changes, Windows Update will begin to work as expected, instead of failing every time.