WinXP 64-bit (Half Life,CS,Doom3 problems)

Question

I finally got this system running well.
The main reason for upgrading the hardware was for gaming. I know my Video card is weak but I will get a 6800 ASAP.
I loaded Half Life (Counter Strike and CZ), Steam [which loaded HL CS Source Beta, and Doom3. I can run steam. However when I try to open Counter Strike or HL I get a quick screen flash and nothing happens. Do I need to move or modify the HL launcher file? Will it work at all? I can launch and play the HL Source Beta version and it is awsome. However my clan (team) and friends are playing the normal version of CS, (1.6).
any ideas?

Answer 1

A few important things to point out:
1.  Win XP 64-bit is not ready for prime-time yet, and for the most part, gaming benchmarks run on XP 64-bit are slower than the same benchmarks run on the same machine using 32-bit Win XP.  The main reason for this is that 64-bit hardware drivers are (for the most part) nowhere near as refined as their 32-bit counterparts.  I recall reading a recent review where it was stated that 64-bit drivers for the ATI Radeon crashed/refused to run with several games/gaming benchmarks.  It's possible that this is the source of your problem (the article also noted that the 64-bit nVidia drivers worked quite well with all the games/gaming benchmarks, so maybe once you have your 6800U everything will work just fine).  Regardless, it may be a good idea to "borrow" a copy of 32-bit Win Xp again and try installing/using that instead of the 64-bit version.
2.  Your probably can't boot from the old HDD because the copy of Win XP on it has hardware drivers installed for a system who's configuration is different than that of your new computer.  Making it work *should* be possible (if extremely tedious).  You'll need to place the HDD back in a computer where it will boot properly, and then remove your existing chipset/hardware drivers and install drivers appropriate to your new setup.  Once this is done try the drive in the new computer again.  Note that if something goes wrong here, then the OS will not boot in EITHER system.
3.  HyperThreading is typically used to refer to the P4's ability to cause itself to be viewed as two logical processors by the operating system.  I'm not sure if the term applies to the Athlon64 at all, and regardless, it does not mean that that you get to have two computers at once functioning independently of each other...just that the system is more efficient at handling multiple threads running at once (so if there are two demanding programs running at once, the HyperThreading system should in theory outperform the non-HyperThreading one...although even without HyperThreading support, any modern CPU has all sorts of efficient ways of handling multiple threads simultaneously).  
4.  If you want to have two OS's booted at once, it can be done however...there are special programs you can use, like VirtualPC, that will let you boot a second OS from within your first OS (so that you can, for example, run linux on top of Windows).  The downside to this is that there's a performance hit that you take when you start running operating systems on top of each other like this (the first oeprating system consumes its normal amount of resources, and then there's an added layer of interpretation necessary to translate commands from the second OS into commands the first OS can understand and then have the first OS execute the commands and then have the results passed back in to the second OS...and so on).
...also, you may want to try disabling DEP.
Hope this helps.