groovydad

Now I come to think of it, I've never had all my 5 speakers working - even with XP. That's not been a problem for me since I use them for music rather than films. I use the optical output from the motherboard to a Creative Inspire 5.1 Digital 5700 box and plug my speakers into there. I'm sorry I haven't been able to help you with this. I just noticed there is an optional Realtek update from Microsoft update. I'll give that a go.

Thank you for this. I had found the solution 5 minutes after posting; should prolly have added a reply rather than edit. Now I find explorer hanging when searching for files on the XP drive - getting 94% memory utilisation. I'm sorely tempted to move everything over to W7 anyway but it's just the hassle of moving back to XP in summer that puts me off. All the best, Mike

I'm pretty sure I may have seen a solution to this somewhere else but in spite of searching have not been able to find it. I have implemented W7 on a seperate hard drive from my XP install. W7 is running just fine. However, within W7 I cannot see the other hard drive (I thought I might be able to access various documents from there). W7 regards the drive on which it is installed as C: In XP from within explorer I can see the hard drive onto which W7 is installed and has it designated as F: (I had installed my 2 DVD drives before installing the hard drive). From within XP I can drill down a number of folder levels of W7 but cannot open any files in there. XP regards the drive it is installed on as C: Is there a way I can access the files on the XP drive from W7? And is the fact that each OS regards the disk on which it is installed as C: likely to cause a problem as I try to access one from the other? Many thanks, Mike Edit: Almost as soon as I posted this I found another forum with the answer. For those with the same problem, try this - Link to solution

To add to the list: Open Office Org 3.0 Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0 Adobe Reader 9

From a long time XP user who didn't see the point in shelling out hard earned cash for Vista (nice though it looks on my daughters' laptops) I have to agree with wraith36's initial positive view on the Beta. I have just installed the 7000 beta 64 bit version as dual boot with my XP SP3 system and have used it for the 10 hours or so since: although the 3.3Gb download took forever, the remainder of the install process was surprisingly easy and painless internet browsing including multimedia delivery seems as fast as under XP and is definitely richer and smoother the taskbar features are really cool (maybe not a justifiable reason for actually purchasing the product but a great USP) recognised and installed driver and software for my iP4300 printer. Sad that I should feel such joy but what a pleasure not to have to hunt around for hair-laden, scratched cds or internet driver searching it just feels much easier to get around in On the downside, I needed to seperately download and install the drivers for the onboard soundcard and I had a minor hanging problem when installing numerous apps without restarting between (a deliberate ploy, of course). I also cannot see the data files on the hard drive that hosts XP but I'll hunt around to see what I need to do to fix. And I wish more vendors would provide 64 bit versions of their software - but I guess it is just a matter of time. I'm also planning to install the latest Ubuntu release by way of comparison just to see what MS has learned...... Although I have quite a few more apps to install and need time to play I am impressed by the quality of what we have and am glad MS seems to have decided to sacrifice functionality in this release for quality of what is delivered. So here's hoping for a continuing bug-free time .......

I would be regarded a novice at all this stuff but I find ImgBurn very easy to use and very reliable. The only problem I encountered was when I downloaded W7 at work and copied to USB stick to take home - I forgot about the encryption. Doh. Regards, Mike

I am using an Asus A8N-SLI Premium, decided to go with the 32bit Windows 7 Beta for now, not tried the HD audio codecs because I just assume, since my onboard sound is not HD they won't work. Hi there. I also have an Asus A8N-SLI premium and had no sound after installing 64 bit W7 beta. I downloaded from the Asus web site and installed fine. I don't have the url any longer but I do have the zip file I downloaded. Happy to get this to you if needed, but I'll need you to provide somewhere to upload to. Regards, Mike

okaaaaayyyyyy .......... and by that I mean I've not yet got over my astonishment of virtualisation - perhaps it sounds naive to you smart guys but I'm just so impressed at being able to create a world within a world. It feels like the Matrix to me. So as I experiment I might just try Virtualbox but for now I'll simply wallow in the splendour of learning something new I knew nothing about 48 hours ago. Cheers, Mike

Just to conclude this, I installed VirtualPC and was able to test my slipstreamed-super-duper Windows XP creation. It worked perfectly and I have to say how impressed I am with the virtual environment. Thank you again, guys. Regards, Mike

Many thanks, jaclaz and MrCobra, your advice worked beautifully - in that I now have a bootable Windows XP disc with SP3, latested hotfixes and required drivers. I just need to get VMWare Player to install without messing up my network drivers (or the nvidia firewall) so I can properly test. Once again thank you for your help.

John, thanks for that, I'll give it a go. So to be clear, everything should be done in a single nLite session? I am also intending to include the latest drivers not provided by Windows (e.g. SATA). Regards, Mike

First of all, a big thank you to all of who have contributed to this forum - I am not particularly technically knowledgeable but find much of the guidance easy to follow. I have reinstalled XP Pro onto my PC a couple of times over the last few years (usually due to fatal hardware errors and in one case due to a complete failure to permanently hunt and destroy a very obstinate virus/trojan chappy) - and it's a real pain: install XP from CD / install SATA drivers / install motherboard and other drivers / then reboot / then install SP2 / then reboot / then install SP3 / reboot / hotfixes / reboot etc. etc. So I was very pleasantly surprised to see there is an ability to create an XP disc with all the Service Packs and hotfixes already applied. However, I seem to run into a problem when trying to integrate the post-SP3 hotfixes. Just so you know, when I do stuff like this I act like a chef following a recipe and I don't truly understand what is happening so let me set out the steps I took: 1. Copied source from XP Pro disc 2. Used nLite (1.4.9.1) to integrate SP2 3. Used nLite to integrate SP3 4. Used nLite to integrate latest hotfixes (obtained from RyanVM.net - RVMUpdatePackSP3_1.0.1.7z) During the integration of the latest hotfixes, nLite crashes with the message "nlite.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close" - this is during the updating of verdanab.ttf. The error signature is as follows: AppName: nlite.exe AppVer: 1.4.9.1 ModName: msvcr90.dll ModVer: 9.0.30729.1 Offset: 00068389 It is possible that I have got some of my sources mixed up (but I had no previous error messages) so I am going to start afresh but can someone confirm that the sequence I am following is correct ? *edit: I have tried the process again and hit the same problem - added a bit more detail above. *edit: created a new source but only applying SP3 (not SP2). This time when applying hotfix I hit the same error but this time when updating winsrv.dll Many thanks, Mike