This is a little bit more than MPSIMS, and seemed a little too technical for IMHO… so I’m posting it here. Mods move it if you must.
Anyway, I like the look and feel of WindowsXP(Pro). I just don’t think it’s very stable. I have so many more problems with it than I ever had with Win2K. I’m actually thinking about switching back to Win2K Pro. Has anyone else experienced a similar delimma? What did you end up doing?
I’ve already had to reinstall the OS twice since I bought it. It’s not like I’m installing obscure software packages, and the drivers haven’t caught up yet… Hell my biggest problems are with installing OfficeXP and Visual Studio.NET.
I’d be interested in people’s opinion who usually like M$ products. (In other words, I’m not looking to hear from the Mac people or the Linux/Unix people… as those are not conceivable options for me)
What file system are you using? I heard great things about Win2k but had atrocious problems with it using FAT32. Then I switched to NTFS and I’ve currently been running XP for about 10 months with maybe 1 or 2 BSOD’s. There’s the occasional compatibilty issue and sometimes it’s too “user friendly” but it’s by far the most stable OS I’ve ever used.
I am really surprised you are having problems with XP and not Win2k. Win2k is basically NT 5.0, and XP is NT 5.1. Despite a major facelift, underneath the hood they are almost the same thing. I have yet to find anything that works on Win2k that doesn’t work on XP.
Other than that, windows XP’s backwards compatibility is a royal piece of crap. I have a lot of software that works fine under NT 4.0 and 98 and dies a horrible death under XP. Playing around with all of the compatibility settings didn’t help any. I ended up dual booting this box with 98 and XP and its a royal pain to switch back and forth just to run different bits of software.
FYI I used FAT32 (so that 98 can see the XP portion of the disk) and I have yet to have a BSOD or any other real problem, except for software compatibility that I mentioned before.
If the box you were on was running 2000 that would indicate good hardware if it was stable then. So… look very closely at all the drivers.
Some pieces of hardware (like some of the not super recent video cards for example) don’t have decent XP drivers yet. Poor video or sound drivers will take XP (or any OS for that matter) down in a hurry.
Drivers, unlike regular app software get direct access to the system hardware, if they screw up or hang, the OS cannot do anything about it but quit.
My girlfriend has an XP Pro box with enough RAM and CPU muscle to embarrass my little PowerBook, but she gets the hourglass and 100% CPU utilization warning periodically and the system becomes unresponsive for up to a full minute. Driving her crazy. She thinks it has something to do with Eudora. I dunno…Eudora is pretty innocuous on the Mac and how much of a resource hog can a straightforward email program be?
It is real easy to figure the source of this issue.
While the system is behaving this way do a <cntrl><alt><delete> to get the task manager, click on the processes tab and sort the processes by CPU utilization by clicking the little cpu sub tab above the column.
Two things that consistently cause temporary performance issues that I have seen.
Find fast indexing the drives (this runs periodically in the background)
The new version of media player sometimes hangs in memory when it is closed and uses pretty much all the cpu cycles. If you see this in the process list using 90+% of cpu cycles (and you are aren’t using the player right that momemt) right click on the that process and terminate it.
I used 2K for a good period of time before transitioning to XP. I’ve found that everything that worked under 2K works under XP. If anything, XP has crashed less for me than 2K.
I will say though, that one component of XP stands out in my mind as being particularly “less compatible” with 3rd-party software than other parts*. Try going into the control panel and then system and disabling “Fast User Switching”.
*Cite: Palm Desktop Software v4.0 Manual says FUS is incompatible with it.
*Questionable Cite: Personal experience, multiple programs including CarTest for DOS, Grand Theft Auto III, others, which lock up more with FUS enabled than with it disabled.
ScottH, I did that last night when it happened again. There was indeed a process eating up 48% of the CPU cycles, but it had a name I did not recognize, some horrid PCesque alphabetsoup followed by .exe which I, being a Mac person, had never heard of.
So I did a Find to see what evil program’s folder contained the file and…it’s in the System32 folder
I jotted down the name of it at home so tonight I will post it here in hopes that someone can tell me what it is and what it’s doing.
I have a box with XP and a laptop with 2K Pro for work. I find them both very stable, but I occasionally crash the laptop. Then again, I run multiple resource hog apps on the 2k system that XP never has to deal with.
I play a lot of games, and I find XP to be friendliest for doing that.
Thanks for the great responses, everybody. I guess I’ll stick with it a little longer.
BTW, I have not ever run Win 2K on THIS machine. I have it on two other computers in my home network, and don’t ever have any problems with it.
My main machine is fairly new. Probably around 6 or so months old.
WinXP Pro
ASUS motherboard P4 2.0 GHz
Video: NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200
Sound: Creative SB Live!
CD1 - 52X generic brand
CD2 - PLEXTOR CD-R PX-W4012A 40/12/40A
Enright, you might want to tell us some of the exact problems you are having. You didn’t even say in the OP if you were crashing, not able to run certain programs, or anything.
by the way, I have nearly the exact configuration you have for one of my machines, only i have an ATI Radeon 7000 vid card and a Celeron (PIII) processor. No problems for me.
xp is aol come to life…all color icons everywhere, can’t find anything, such as the volume control that was always down in the lower, right hand corner.
my corel draw 9 would not work on xp, had to move it back to win98, same with my old adobe 4.
getting use to it by the day but hating every minute of it. have not yet found a solid benefit.
i did not upgrade i bought a new computer with xp installed.
Color icons. Heh. I know a couple of people who refer to it as the “fisher price interface.” FYI you can easily change it to look like older versions of windows (hmm… then why upgrade to xp…but then if it came with the computer…). Right click on a blank area of the screen and select properties, then select the theme you want.
The volume control is easy too. start -> control panel, then click where it says switch to classic view. I can’t find a damn thing with their new and improved control panel. Sheesh. Ok, now click on sound and audio devices, then check the box that says “place volme icon on the task bar.” They changed it from what looks like a slide pot to what looks like a speaker (I swear sometimes they change things just to change them) but at least its now where you can use it.
I don’t use corel, but I feel your pain. The one that bothers me is protel (a schematic and board layout package). Works fine under 98 and NT 4. If it was a 98 only thing I wouldn’t be so ticked (despite the hype XP is not the “successor” to 98, it’s NT 5.1 and the 98 line is dead, period), but it works fine under NT 4 and I expect the NT line to be upward compatible. Under XP it just plain locks up every now and then, and never exits gracefully. I’m in the same boat as the OP. I can’t switch to linux so that’s not even worth discussing, but XP does so many things better than 98, and yet won’t run quite a bit of my software. And I’m also not running obscure software. Protel is one of the most popular electronic design packages out there.
I disabled the Fisher Price look as soon as I installed XP for the first time. I DID really prefer the old Win98 interface to XP’s attempt at a “icon-free desktop” (then why bother with a desktop, I wonder?). You gotta remember that XP is far more stable than 98 ever was.
To the OP… when I first installed XP, I had a few crashes, usually connected to games going haywire. But for the past six months or so, I haven’t had any crashes at all. Probably due to all the upgrades available for download or something, I dunno.
Oh, and by the way… I’ve found that OfficeXP is a lot more unstable than Office 2000. Maybe that’s just me…?
wow, i’ve got my volume control back. thank you. such a small thing and so important. i am a graphic designer working out of a home office and needing to turn down the sound everytime the phone rings. still can not find a volume adjustment on my new keyboard, but at least now i can do it with the mouse.
around here xp is called the “candy cane” version of windows. i switched my layout to the silver mode and got rid of a lot of the unnecessairy color. it was awful showing my drawings to clients with all that color in the borders.
another problem i am having with the new computer is the burning program. it is called “nero” and i can’t do a damn thing with it. none of the instructions makes a bit of sense to me. any advice there?
Problems with XP are commonly due to ACPI, Advanced Configuration and Power Interface. This forces all of your devices to share the same meager resources, and while this may work fine in Microsoft’s fantasy world, in real life your devices just won’t tolerate it. The downside of disabling ACPI is that your system will no longer turn itself off when you shutdown, you’ll have to manually press the power button at the “It is now safe to turn off your computer” screen. On a currently running installation, here’s how to remove ACPI:
Go to control panel, system, hardware, device manager, click the plus next to Computer. Highlight “ACPI PC”, right click, and choose Update Drivers. Jump through the hoops to make it let you manually choose the driver from a list. You may have to uncheck the “show only compatible drivers” box. Find the “Standard PC” option, and update the drivers. The system will reboot, all your drivers will be reinstalled, and you should notice a dramatic reduction in problems, as well as slightly faster operation. Note: If you end up with two “Standard PC” entries in device manager after doing this, simply delete the second one.
Here’s how to fix it during a new installation of Windows XP:
While the XP installation is starting up and is still at the blue screen, before you are asked to press anything, the words “Press F6 to specify RAID drivers” will appear on the bottom of the screen. When this happens, press F5(not F6), and you will be taken to a window that will allow you to specify the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) to use during installation. The default choice will be ACPI PC, and another option will be displayed. Use the arrow keys to scroll down to Standard PC, and choose that. This will install XP without ACPI, and has resulted in the fastest, most stable installations of XP I have ever done.
FDISK will not be held responsible for any damage that may occur to your computer from the use of this information. FDISK has done it himself without problems.
