kteague

OS/2, hands down! Hahaa, j/k! Well, since XP is out of the question for you, I'm afraid you're gaming experience is going to be rather limited. Take Age of Empires III as an example. A new game released by Microsoft and *does* *not* support Windows 2000; only Windows XP. Don't you love how Microsoft forces time lines on you? I sure do!... <cough>bastards</cough> Since Windows 2000 is becoming "too old", at least in Microsoft's eyes, and you don't want to use Windows XP, I'm afraid your only other choice that will give you a lot of games to play is Linux. I'm afraid you're incorrect in that there are not many games for Linux... well, only partially incorrect. The games themselves are not *native* to linux, but they can be run under linux using Cedega (http://www.transgaming.com/). Although the games run under linux using Cedega, that doesn't mean the games are 100% compatible. For example, I was a big Solider of Fortune II player -- not single player, but online playing. Unfortunately, PunkBuster didn't work and I kept getting booted from PB-enabled servers every 3 minutes. Imagine trying to feed your SoF2 craving while getting booted every 3 minutes. Other problems I had were: 1. Not being able to perform a keystroke to swap out of the game to my desktop so I could run a 3rd party executable mod for World of Warcraft, the Allakhazam LUA addon which gathers game data and publishes it to their database. 2. Games that came on multiple CD's were hard to install because Linux handles CD-ROM devices differently, and locks the tray inside until the file system is unmounted. Point2play, the front-end to Cedega, wasn't aware of when an installation requested another CD. 3. When a game would crash, I would end up at my desktop in pan/scan mode (e.g. 1280x1024 desktop size with 800x600 viewable on the screen). The games I play are very limited, so I can't give you good or bad stories about a lot of the games out there. The above is just my experience with the few games I play. However, even though I mention the "bad" stuff, it doesn't mean Cedega is bad. It has a lot of good points: 1. Friendly and knowledgable support. 2. A voting system to have new game support added, existing bugs fixed, etc. (the more you pay them per month, the more votes you're allowed to submit -- $5/month = base fee gives you 1 vote per month). 3. The way it works. It doesn't emulate anything such as a PC or Windows. They basically supply DirectX/Direc3D DLL's that the games hook in to and, instead of the games hooking in to Windows DLL's, they're hooking in to the DLL's made by Transgaming. In essence, it's a souped up version of WINE (http://www.winehq.com/). I switched from XP (also due to the activation crap I had to deal with after coming home from work one day and my PC rebooted fro AutoUpdates and thought I had new hardware) to Debian GNU/Linux and Cedega. I'd have to admit, I did some hellafied upgrades to my hardware for the longest time without having to go through reactivation. It was just annoying to go home one day after fixing a bunch of computer related stuff at work, hoping to kick back, relax, and play a game to wind down, just to find out Microsoft ****ed me with no Vasoline and some 20-grit sandpaper (specially manufactured by Microsoft) wrapped around their rods, giving it to me DP-style. I used that for about a year, paying for my Cedega membership, giving them my 2 cents, and placing my votes. Then, after the shortcomings I faced (see above), I went back to the Dark Side and, my father, Lord Vader (Bill Gates) sits right next to me. I can say I'm happy for now... at least, until my next crash. At that point, I'll probably see the light at the end of the tunnel again as I pop my old Linux hard disk back in the drive and hold two middle fingers up, facing northward to Redmond, WA.. Yeah, that's right, Bill. I still hate you for the job security your nimwit developers give me on a daily basis.

I just wanted to confirm that I did integrate DirectX v9.0c *and* performed a light nlite of my sourcess without problems. dxdiag shows no problems. I suppose the problems others have noticed were with a heavily nlite'd source. In mine, I only disabled a few services (DNS Client and Messenger), removed a few apps (Games and other things that were not red), and a few tweaks (detail views, don't create OE links, and CMD SHELL, expand menus, don't use personalized menus, no web folders, I'm using hfslip to slipstream IE6, DirectX, MediaPlayer9, all current hotfixes and the rollup update. That's about it. The only problems I had were: - System Event Notification service (somehow went in to a DISABLED state). I think this may be due to M$ launching update.microsoft.com over the weekend. My first set of updates came from v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com, but thereafter went to the new site. This caused BITS to not start and updates from the new site failed. - CMD SHELL shows up twice when right-clicking on the C: drive. - Details view didn't stick when a new user logged in, right-clicked on the START menu, and selected EXPLORE. The first issue was possibly Microsoft, the other two were with nlite. Nothing serious... just some small bugs. - Ken