Octopuss

No other changes? I was so excited from new version

"Compare"? When it's years apart, you can't even begin calling it a comparison. I'm not talking about driver and software versions, or whatever changes you may have made to your hardware. I am talking about something far more basic: Your memory. Your perceived relative stability of the two systems is clouded by the fact that you can't actually gauge how they both actually work, you simply think you remember this or that crashing and stick with that. my memory about this is pretty good, thank you. And I stand for what I posted above. Ok I will be more specific. I've been using XP since 2002 I believe. Before that I had 98SE. It might even be that I used 98 for shorter period of time than XP. But at least the times were even. Do you? (to prove otherwise? Else you're claiming just as much as I do) How much physical memory do you have, now and then? What other programs did you have running on your 98? How is your virtual memory configured, now and then? Most importantly: How many patches did Ultima Online run through since then up to today? (After all, a MMORPG's updates aren't optional) At any rate, 10 instances of any application is fairly crappy, if you ask me. Suffice to say, my harddrive never thrashed. Excuse me, are you stupid or do you fail at reading? I stated "THE EXACTLY SAME PC". That's your theory. No that's your CLAIM (*cough*) Provided you have a bootable disk, and the BIOS to support it. Uhm, what? I don't quite get this. What OS doesn't need bootable disk? What PC doesn't have BIOS that supports... what exactly? Do you find having bootable installation cd for your OS of choice uncommon/problematic/whatever? The bios part is a mystery. Perhaps it's a misunderstanding? I meant the process of inserting the cd, installing system, then installling drivers and then apps. Of course, I got custom-made "nLited" cd with drivers included and all the crap excluded. While I had far less direct comparison there, 2000 did demonstrate practically crash-less solidity for as long as I've seen it run, and far less bloatiness than the XPs I've seen. Yeah XP neds a bit more tweaking than 2000 to achieve very good performance. It's like variously updated and optimized 2000, but unfortunately also more unwanted stuff you need to get rid of. But nothing hard, really. I'm not calling myself expert, but I don't think I'm complete lamer either. I ONLY was talking about one specific case when you either want to get rid of crap that accumulated over five years of heavy use of the pc, where people installed millions of apps, uninstalled, installed over, deleted, loaded with spy- and whatever-wave etc etc or when you want to move onto new version of the OS. Installing say XP over 2000 is one hell of bad idea. Seen that and similar cases as well. Just yuck. The results were pretty scary (though average George would say "it works"). Of course I didn't mean reinstalling is a good idea to fix a problem that showed up. Only had to solve something maybe three times in total in last years this way. BUT it's also true that sometimes it's faster Like when you're testing something (specific).

Windows 7 and 8 is pathetically laughable. Just why the f*** does Microsoft work on new stuff when the already existing barely works. Wtf. Who needs new Windows anyway?

Latest version of Opera is 9.27.

Exactly. I can compare the rough percentage of crashes from my 98 era and XP era. XP is MUCH MORE stable and harder to bring down than 98. That's simply a fact. One of the biggest problems I had with 98 was that when an application went bananas and crashed, it usually took the whole OS with it. Regarding memory management - take this, for example. I used to play Ultima Online. With 98 I could run two instances (two clients at time) at most and only immediatelly after boot. On XP (and 2k of course, they are built on same core/technology), with the exact same PC, the roof was somewhere around ten. Then the system started to swap violently. But of course. XP being built on NT technology, which is much more complex. When properly tweaked, XP can use as low as 50MB of memory and still remain functional, btw. that has absolutely nothing to do with XP. Unless you switch off the whole PC instead of doing start->shutdown (then there's SLIM chance of problems with data) Technological differences that say nothing about system's stability/reliability/quality. With 98 you could pretty much boot into DOS and swap a few files (well, based on how bad the problem was) and the system would be good as new. New technologies ask for new solutions I don't totally disagree with you on this, but I can have XP reinstalled with almost all applications I normally use within an hour. I see no problem Oh my. When I started working in this department of "my" company year ago, half the PCs were installed with W2000. I almost grew grey hair. They worked, sure, but it's still ages old compared to XP, with outdated components and generally slow. The average amount of random freezes/crashes after performing regular tasks was high. I still am stunned by the fact they still worked after the years and changes people did to them, though. The same machines performed like new when properly reinstalled with XP. I only am talking from my own experiences with doing complete support for up to 700 users (which, I believe, gives me quite a bit of statistical data as well) - which means I got my hands onto ~500 machines. I am by no means trying to throw garbage on 2000. Hell no. I loved the system and was reluctant to move to XP some years ago. But XP is better. It just is. For those who still use 98 and got no problems, all I got to say is Hell yeah! Go for it! The whole point, however, is that XP is superior to this and 2k. (sure, if I still had my old Duron/700 with 256MB ram, I probably wouldn't run anything higher than 2k, which WAS a bit less resources-hungry than XP.

There are around 7 or so computers in this house. Aside from my 98SE and a couple of linux boxes, most use XP. So far, the XPs have dominated the top spots in crash frequency. Without wanting to fall into flaming and stupid arguing - dude, this is SO clueless statement. User's inability to properly configure the system has nothing to do with its stability whatsoever. Yes, back then I though 98SE is stable. Everyone who knew a little though - and it was pretty much true. But now that I can compare - no way in hell. I could start going into argument abut 98SE vs XP but that would take pages and each side would still figh for his truth. No sh*t? XP NOT being graphical UI over DOS and all? On my work PC which I do pretty nasty stuff with I had well over 1000 hours of uptime - those being hours the PC was actively used. I only had to restart cause of an update to some software. We are getting into ridiculous grounds here and I don't really think this needs further commenting.

I liked 98SE. Was extremely against 2000 until I tried it and understood it a bit. No idea when I moved onto XP, but when properly stripped down and tweaked, there's NOTHING better. Memory management in 98 is s*** and the whole thing is SO easy to crash. Not to mention you can't run most of more modern applications on 98. Don't get me wrong, in it's time it was really good, but sorry - not anymore. Of course, if you still use old apps and have ancient hadware, then yes, it's the way to go. Otherwise - stripped XP SP3 all the way. Just for the record - played with Vista twice. First time year ago - it just didn't even boot properly, crashes, gazzilion of error popups... This time it boots and WORKS (doesn't crash), but that's it. Even stripped down with vLite it's still utter crap. I'm sticking to my tweaked XP

Enable the Gigabyte Boot Screen in the bios, it's ugly but it should solve your problem. O.M.F.G. :( *smashes head to the wall*

Well, this one doesn't. It's really weird.

So I played around with disks in AHCI mode. Everything worked well, BUT one extremely annoying thing - when this is enabled, instead of regular POST screen the AHCI bios screen shows up and doesn't go away until the PC starts booting, obviously making it impossible to get into the BIOS or pop up the boot mnu (as a matter of fact I can still do it, but it's a blind game plus I only have like ~0.1s to do it). Any ideas? The board is GA P35-DS4 rev2.1 with bios version F12.

I still don't get it. Since when are developers of free software told how to pack the stuff and whar installer to use? On a side note - any more tweaks coming up? I guess it's not that fast to discover them though

Whoa, new version!! Great! P.S. Why did you HAVE TO?

How is it decided whether this popup shows or not?

Would be not just great but totally awesome if you learned to use proper english or didn't post at all so some of us don't get headaches.

I made sure I downloaded the correct package. Yeah. The signature is perfectly ok - well, doubleclicking the files and checking shows they are signed. I will give it another try when I get from work. MAYBE I put something else on the **** diskette, but um... Even if I put the 32stuff there which I use for XP installation, it should NOT babble crap about signatures as those files are signed just as well!

You don't have to slipstream anything if you don't want to. If you want to, you gotta know which ones were released after SP3. Simple as that.

I got the 2.1 revision, so yes, the latest. Download page for that is http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Motherb...?ProductID=2745 This would be the file we're after http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Motherb...amp;FileID=3101. The other SATA thing is GigaByte's own SATA controller which I always keep turned off. Regarding Intel, the site is a mess. You actually have to browse the products, find the chipset page http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/P35/index.htm and navigate to download area http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/sb/CS-026488.htm Then for 64bit Vista you would end up here The specific file would finally be this Now comparing the two packages, you end up with exactly the same files, maybe different in version, but that's not important. What a nut to break...

In the end I just reinstalled the whole system. Didn't even take too long. Lesson learned. It did install on correct disk and partition. But it added crapload of files on the other disk's 1st partition. What does BCD stand for? No idea what bootloader is either. I am not into these things really. All I can shout in anger is "Vista blows!" and it's true. No matter where I tell it to install it shouldn't touch any other place. Period. P.S. What does "invoking NTLDR" mean?

It's not Intel board. It's Gigabyte P35-DS4. But Intel drivers is what's needed. Gigabyte provides those same ones (only that they are outdated) on their web.

While I can't give you any answer, it brough me such sweet memories I should get some old PC with DOS and Norton Commander just for the hell if it

So I managed to screw up my main disk while playing with Vista. Partially my fault, but who the hell would expect... I plugged in another disk, started installing and chose the new drive as destination. It installed fine, EXCEPT for the hiden fact that the stupid installed totally changed the boot area on my main disk where XP is installed. I later booted back and was like WTF are these folders, what's this 2GB of data? Deleted it and couldn't boot since. Awgh. Later I realized what most probably happened was Vista overwriting the boot manager or whatever it is with its own, which can't be reverted back, or at least I got no means to do so. Why on earth does Vista even touch drives it's not being told to?

I got my hands on 64bit Ultimate version and played with it a little. I am totally unable to install with disk in AHCI mode, when I get prompted for driver, the **** thing doesn't accept it, babbling about need for signed drivers. There are no such signed drivers whatsoever!! I downloaded them straight from Intel's web and there's nothing else. Help! What now?

Oh, shame on me, not installation, but messing about with already installed system. Nevermind then

Hm, well, I just installed the system with help of a diskette with the driver so I can't really comment on this. Didn't work otherwise. But once installed, it works perfectly. I even have an impression it's a bit faster.

I will install system onto other HDD with these in few mins. What exactly do you want to know?