Well courtesy of work, I've moved my home PC to Windows XP SP2. I've resisted the move for a long time because it was my perception that the steep system requirement would mean a significant drop in performance. But Windows ME has never been terriby stable and what good is performance if your machine crashes on you regularly.
Admittedly, I'm a power user and not typical. I often overclock my machines (which can increase instability greatly) and do funky things like running digital compression programs that max out the CPU time.
We'll see how XP SP2 handles this tasking of ripping movies from my DVDs and compressing them. For the most part, it recognized my devices (I built the PC in the last two years) but it does seem to have a problem with the WinTV (Hauppage) card. I may no longer be able to watch TV on my monitor if I don't sort this out. Not a huge loss, but it was convenient.
The stock drivers for Hauppage and XP don't seem to work. Either that, or I have the wrong device :>. One really unfortunate thing about Windows systems in general is that they give you very few if any clues about the devices in your Device Manager that are not working properly. So if you don't have drivers installed you cannot figure out what the device is!
With modern motherboards (mine is a Gigabyte 7N400 Pro) there ar a ton of chips on the board with extended functionality. All of them need their own drivers. Then I have Firewire, a TV card, a sophisticated video card, a 5.1 audio card (in addition to the onboard audio). Plus the motherboard has onboard gigabit Ethernet. It gets pretty complicated.
But nobody said Windows was easy to use. :>
Posted by artandscience at February 12, 2005 11:14 AMAfter an intended system wipe I haven't installed the drivers for my Audigy correctly. How do I know? Well I have sound and system devices say everything is a-okay...but when I go to speaker config I'm told there is no sound card available ;)
I never trust system devices.
btw nice to see regular posts from you.
Posted by: Gary at February 12, 2005 12:09 PMThanks.. I had kind of a hiatus over late November/December I think. Now that I'm working, many things seem to be worth commenting about. Since I cannot write about work (see "fear of being fired") I write about other things.
I'm not quite as prolific as last summer but I seem to be able to manage almost a post a day.
Now I going to catch up on your blog while I load up my iPod Shuffle (more about that later!).
Posted by: stefan at February 12, 2005 12:37 PMI USE XP IT IS VERY EXCLENT
Posted by: prasanna kumar .K.R at March 8, 2005 09:07 AM