> Aside : anyone else noticed how much better XP is at not thrashing > under a reasonable load?
Yes - or is that my new computer is harder to get to a reasonable load? I have just got a new computer (well, bits which I assembled) which is very grunty. It was bought through work and they insisted in my buying "a computer" and not parts for self assembly - they believed that my motivation for wanting the parts was to save money (they are not IT people). The company I got it through understood my desire to build it myself but sold it to me as "a computer" so I got an OEM OS thrown in. If you buy XP that way it costs $300 and something. Buying it off the shelf is about twice. The XP license lets you load any previous OS so I can run Win2K server if I want for the $300. It was worth the $300 to do it that way. I have decided to give XP a go - to see what it is really like as in the past I have not bothered with it. One driver update has caused it problems and, after replacing that, it is working great. I went back to the one shipped with the hardware which was the latest when I bought it - they put a new one out the following day. The specs are: CPU AMD XP2500+ Barton Motherboard LeadLek K7NCR18G Pro II ATX (everything is onboard) Memory 2*512 Mbyte (1 Gig) Dual Channel Legend DDR333 Screen Philips 109P Case/PS ThermoTake Case with a 420W Power Supply Disk Seagate SATA 120Gig with 8M Cache My last machine was an AMD K6 2 400. I kept my two old CD players (one writer). This one is rock solid. When I have done something that caused problems or could have caused problems (the bad video driver) it did crash once when I was trying to identify the problem. On rebooting XP told me what caused the crash - i.e, exactly what file was doing what at the time the crash happened. To really test this out, and cos I like the idea of it anyway, I am running one of those programmes which use my spare CPU time for something useful. The one I am doing is http://folding.stanford.edu - it redirects but that it the right link. I have my CPU running at 98% all the time. The temp it runs at is 8 degrees above normal but still within acceptable limits. I found XP easy to set up after the initial problem with getting the SATA disk to work before the OS was loaded. Drivers for it MUST be on a floppy drive and I do not have a working floppy drive. It takes 7 secs to copy a 4:00 min song from an audio CD to the HDD - 10 secs if it is playing from the CD at the same time. This is with http://folding.stanford.edu running in the background. I am sure that the specs of this beast make it harder to make it work too hard but I have tried and cannot get it to fail. The few times it has have all ways been with very nice recoveries. Many features of it do appear to be bloatware which is why I never changed to it in the past. This time I have decided to USE these things - to really see if they do add to the usefulness of the environment which means I need to work out what they all are and why they are there then use them. I could do without them all - there really was nothing wrong with programming in machine code on my 6502 machine BUT this is faster and looks nicer too ;-). My conclusion at this time (after a week) is that I will stick with XP. I have used Unix and liked it but I need Excel so will use and MS OS anyway and XP is their best. Chrissy. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- New Zealand Delphi Users group - Offtopic List - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Website: http://www.delphi.org.nz To UnSub, send email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] with body of "unsubscribe offtopic" Web Archive at: http://www.mail-archive.com/offtopic%40delphi.org.nz/
