dencorso

4Kn HDDs seem to be the way to go, in the near futures, when no more 512n HDDs are findable. But either a DDO or some contoller with the right BIOS and a reasonable price will have to be found...

Hrm... why do you think we actually need to have a reason? Because we never felt like it, or whatever, I guess. No offense is meant by this reply, though.

No. We don't have and IRC channel, never had any since incept time (16 years ago) nor intend to ever have one. You are welcome!

Now, then, why would I actually pay for a GPT loader for XP, if I have no 512e device bigger than 2.2 Tb? I can justify paying for various of Rloew's fixes for DOS/9x, or for a very expensive pendrive (which you'd not consider a pendrive), but not for a device driver I see no use for...

Let Office 2003 be! As I said, I have one machine with Office 97 and 3 with Ofice 2000 (one of which has actually 3 installations) and have never ever had any problem whatsoever with that. Get yourself a prescription for some antianxiety pills (prefereably a truckload of them) and just be happy. \m/

@jaclaz: In other words, an add-on board with the proper BIOS is a must. Do we have any other reports (and more brands) of further testings?

I'm toying with that idea, too, for my XP SP3. Now, while we know it's compatible, some searching may be needed for the correct drivers. I think yo may go with the Sabretooth drivers for most things. Of course, you'll have to see which sound and USB 3.0 controllers are used in your specific board before picking those drivers. And I'd go, hands down, with Fernando's recommended AHCI driver. As for graphics, that'll depend on the add-on board you select.

Well, here're my results, up to now: Main machine (i7 3770K on P8Z68-V LX): 1st (main) XP SP3 partition - 1 min to update list; 2nd (maintenance/bank) partition - 1 min to update list; XP mode on 7 SP1 x64 - 1 min to update list. Second machine (i7 3770K on H67MA-E35 B3): sole XP SP3 partition - 1 min to update list. All of them have fully up-to-date Office 2000 SP3 with fully up-to-date Office 2003 Compatibility Pack and Office 2007 Compatibility Pack on top of it. Procedure used always the same: installed Comparability Pack update, then the IE8 one, and rebooted. Then I told MU to look for updates and waited the time indicated.

Install just the latest IE8 update by hand, then try again.

Of course, who 1st found out the procedure I described was @heinoganda! In fact, my post quoted below was just an attempt to point out the procedure he described worked great for me (and, in a way, it was the last opportunity to fully test it, since, henceforward, only the IE8 update should suffice, unless some unexpected Office Compatibility Pack and / or Office Updates end up being released out-of-band (very unusual, but has happened before in similar cases)...

Well, I've downloaded and installed Comparability Pack update, then the IE8 one, and rebooted. Then I told MU to look for updates and waited just 1 (one) minute, before it gave me the list with the remaining updates. Did the same on my second machine and got the same result. And I guess, form next month on, just adding by hand the IE8 update ought to be enough to get such a result, once again.

Bright Night ?

NyXP (in reference to Nyx)

Since New Moon is just a temp name, let me suggest a name: "XP Moonshine".

Who remembers these?

Provided overclocking is not intended, the msi H67MA-E35 B3 (it must be B3!) is also great. It's a Micro-ATX, but it does have one PCI socket (and two further PCI-e x1 sockets that can be easily used for PCI-e to PCI adapters, if needed). It can take the i7-3770 or the i7-3770k (both 8 threads/4 cores) or the i5-3570 (4 cores/4 threads) and has the great NEC uPD720200 chip providing two onboard rear USB 3.0 ports), 2 SATA III plus 4 SATA II also come in very handy. All drivers for XP and for 7 exist, so I guess those for Vist should be available, too. Also for this board, however, one must be aware that one might have to purchase (or borrow from a friend/relative) a Sandy Bridge CPU to boot up the system for the first time, when building from scratch, as the original BIOS version for these boards does not support the use of Ivy Bridge CPUs and will not allow booting the machine without first updating the BIOS.

If it's not a signed binary, it can be done by editing the string resources, probably... but if it's signed the signature'll become invalid and should be removed. All in all, do you think it's worth the effort?

Sorry, Jack, but it's telling you the truth: since Office 2007, the default actually *IS* .docx. so it actully *IS* in (legacy) compatibility mode... it's not just trying to annoy you. Before you ask, the newest version I use at home is Office 2000... at work I have to bear with Office 2010, too... but, then again, I'm getting paid to bear with it and be less productive because of it (because I spend part of the time loathing it), so I really don't care that much.

OTOH, the Athlon XP also has SSE support...

If I can transfer my compressed spanned backup images (set to 2GiB to be easily moved from CDFS to FAT-32 to wherever) fast enough, I'm satisfied. If I had any 1TB sized file, it would be a big PITA to handle. And most living human beings also do not have or use such ginormous files. Let's keep to real-world conditions. BTW: I really doubt you've ever got more than 35 MB/s on a USB 2.0 port of any maker, with any board, any OS and whatever storage device, in real-world conditions.

I've already corrected that statement. It's SATA that uses 10 bits per byte not USB. Anyway, I have an OCZ-Vertex3 attached to one of the SATA III ports of the P8Z68-V LX and it can actually sustain sequential reads of 470 MB/s across several 2GiB files. So the Z68 and the onboard bus are able to sustain at least that much easily. And, as I said above, I have one pendrive that gives sequential reads of 197 MB/s on XP (and another one that sustains sequential reads 188 MB/s). I really doubt You've ever got more than 35 MB/s on a USB 2.0 port of any maker, with any board, any OS and whatever storage device, in real world conditions.

Yes and yes! Well, if you mean 5Gb/s ( = 625 MB/s), possibly, but I don't own any USB 3.0 storage device capable of that, so I cannot tell. But does 197 MB/s on a pendrive sound convincing enough for you? Look at those pendrive tests below and form your opinion. I've attached the datasheet for the ASMedia 1042 controller it uses, too, for the sake of completeness. BTW, true (= real life) USB 2.0 spped is no more than 35 MB/s (i. e. not at all the 60 MB/s from the specs). ASMedia 1042.pdf

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Original-ASUS-P8Z68-V-LX-Motherboard-LGA-1155-Intel-Z68-ATX-DDR3-I-O-Shield-Test-/263196459654?hash=item3d47bb4286:g:7RIAAOSwKFBZs7eA

No. It wasn't the Z68. It was the H67, of which only the B3 version is good (pretty good, and easy to find, BTW). Then don't reply to my point, since you didn't look at the numbers.