Err ... do you have some job openings?

 

eXPerience does release some tight editions, but when you run the newest stuff out, their auto driver install packs go totally fucking nuts and screw up your driver installs. Huge headache, but if you're running something a year or two old, they're pretty awesome.

I'm using a modified eXperience light XP SP 2 Pro myself. Getting ready to swap over to Black XP to have the Aero interface while on XP.

 

Hnn... I never had that problem...


Black XP is cool though... ive got a disk somewhere for it but it always hangs on install for me now a days. :/

 

I can understand using Black XP for a fresh install, but if you're already running a lite-XP then isn't it a simpler solution to just install WindowBlinds and the appropriate theme? I believe that's was how Black XP gets it's Aero interface.

Getting the Sidebar working sounds kinda cludgy, but doable.

WinStep Xtreme seems to do the same thing. http://www.techmixer.com/change-xp-themes-to-black-stylish-aero-xp-theme-using-winstep-xtreme-74/

I'm just wondering why you'd go with an OS re-install instead.

As an aside: How can you verify that your copy of Black XP is clean and not a trojan? Perhaps some kind of bit-by-bit comparison with a standard XP installation / install disc?

My only experience in this area has been using nLite to slim and stream my current install. The first and last time I tried out desktop replacement was with WindowBlinds and Aston Shell several computers and more years ago. Evidence points to it being on Win 98SE.

/yak points to above para "That's my ignorance escape clause."

Yak.

 

A) It's time for a reinstall. My current Xp is around 4 months old, and it's gotten to where half the time on PC start, explorer doesn't load my desktop or programs. Logoff and logback in works. It also makes me repair my network connection each time I want to use the net. I could do a repair, but I'd rather just fresh install. Only way to keep XP running smooth is to do fresh reinstalls every so often if you change stuff on the PC constantly.

B) I have shitty experiences with WinBlinds. It may be the application, or it may of been bad coding or something with the theme plug ins I've used, but I've had several totally fuck up my themes before, and 1 that would not remove itself no matter what. That being said. When it comes preinstalled, tweaked like hell, it usually works fine. Installing it by istelf, then adding in user made packs never works for me. As for it not being a trojan, well if 900+ people review it and say it's clean, I trust it's clean.

 

I forgot to mention, Carl, you overclocking that quad core at all? With the current apps the way they are, unless you're running heavy vid or sound editing, your cores are more of less being wasted as next to nothing is optimized for duals or above yet =/

I OCed the piss out of my rig for example, everyday use 3.4ghz steady, for showing off I can get 3.7 with minor crashing in Orthos.

Figure if you're not OCing the quads, you could've gotten a dual core e6600 like I got, did a minor overclock, and saved anywhere from $50-$300 depending on when you bought your Quad for the exact same performance unless you were a heavy vid/sound editor.

insert PC porn lol

 

The E6750 is a better buy than the E6600 at the moment, prices are dropping like crazy and with the new releases in January they will come down even more.

The Q6600 is the choice at the moment with a bit of potential for over clocking.

The Extreme 6600 is a beast of a thing with the unlocked multiplier.

Even with the locked multiplier, even with stock cooling you can get a few hundred mhz out of both the E6750 and the Q6600 and with after market cooling even more with little to no voltage tweaks.

Middy: You must do a lot of system changes in 4 months for XP to act like that. I went for over 2 years without a single format and reinstall without any major or minor problems at all. Although a lot of crap had built up over the time, it still ran pretty good. Until I swapped out the MoBo, CPU, RAM and Video card for newer components and fucked up the workaround.

I haven't delved into modified versions of XP, how decent are they and are they worth the change?

 

A) The e6600 is a better buy then the e6750. They clock higher, easier, cheaper. We went through 5 6750's, and none could hold a clock as stable as my e6600. Supply and demand. They're made the exact same way, on the exact same chip. Ones that can't handled the higher clock speed because of temperature issues (90% of the time it's the temps that make Intel clock them lower) get stamped as some lower clock speed that's in demand. Intel doesn't know what sort of cooling condition chips go under, so they drastically downclock the chips to make sure they'll be able to perform. My chip for example, at 3.4 ghz at this moment, loads at a mere 47degrees celcius @ 1.3v. My friends e6750 however, clocks to 3.1ghz, loads at 63 degrees and takes 1.425vs to get it stable. The 6600 was the huge seller for a very long time, so they evidentally tended to stick the majority of the chips either there, or in the extreme edition, which was funny as well, as I had a friend who bought the EE, only to see it's OC be 300 mhzish, yet mine got 1.3ghz before it started getting too hot due to the volts I had to crank through it to keep it stable.


Not necc. system changes, but I install stuff nonstop and have around 100 gbs at least of crap a week coming in/going out, being installed/uninstalled, etc so my system stays cluttered with garbage.

And the modified versions are pretty nice. I had one light xp version that only used like 60mbs of memory at desktop. Looked fugly, but it was stupid fast. Loaded to where I could stand using it, it was like 240 mbs of RAM used.

 

I got my quad for about £30-50 more than the same dual core. I haven't got round to overclocking it yet but I have been playing around with my GPU somewhat.

 

A little off topic, but not really.

What would it take for most of us to drop XP and go with Vista? What standout game, application, or programs would make you want to take the leap? Even with all the arguments against it?

Possibly Kotor 3 could make me take the leap, if they ever get around to making it. Then again, I would get out cheaper by buying an X-Box to play it...

 

Nothing. My mother has Vista on an actually decent machine. Add a video card and it'll play 95% of the games on the market well.

I utterly and completely loath it and would never use it unless forced.

At the moment i dont even use XP for anything. Ive got it in a Virtual Machine for photoshop and my IRC script, and such not and dual-booted on a second HDD for games.

Vista is just fucky on my comp. Example being I can run Hellgate with pretty high settings on XP perfectly fine with no lag at all. On Vista, on medium after turning off all the bells and whistles, I still get fucked graphics.

So unless Vista gets some serious fucking work done and not just SP's and shit, I'll stick to XP and (K)Ubuntu

 

The reason why the E6750 is better than the E6600 is because of the price. It's release price only around $183. It presents better value compared to the E6600 regards price at standard clocks. If you want more value for money and have after market cooling, of course the E6600 will be a lot better, even though they OC fairly good on stock cooling, as it has a lot more head room, yet it is still dependant on your luck regarding the extent to which the chip will OC as you mentioned. Remember, not all people OC for various reasons, including voiding the warranty, heat issues and not wanting to shorten the life of their CPU (albeit a false fear).

The only reason I can see that happening is which bad maintenance. Regular defrags, CClean's and registry clean ups should be able to keep a file system and OS pretty damn clean and efficient. I'd hate to see the state of your fragmentation of your hard drives with that amount of installing/uninstalling going on every week.

How do they stand on sacrificing features and functionality in lieu of speed?

I use WindowBlinds, LogonStudio and Bootscreen with great success. Doesn't eat much resources at all through using small file sized themes seems to stop it eating away at resources.

Tried to upload a screen shot, but photobucket is being a shit stain.

Edit: Working now http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c302/RMurton/screenWindowBlinds.jpg

 

Fix the shitty use of memory.

Fix the random crashes caused by Vista rapidly trying to dump stuff it's holdin gin precache/prefetch, when your main app needs more memory. It'll sometimes dump a huge block at once, and lock you up. Most often seen in mass editing.

Make more games support it, and run better on it. This has to be fixed by Vista itself. I've got games I get 80+ fps on on XP, yet 20-30 jerky fps on Vista. Hellgate, Stalker, Halo 1, Witcher spring it mind immediatley. DX10 is just a slightly more polished version of 9, it's not the dx causing the games to fail.

Make Vista not use as much memory. Current Xp set up, 47 processes open, winamp, firefox, peerguardian, sxfire, mirc to name a few. 450 megs of memory used. Vista, sitting at desktop, only thing loaded that isn't default was Creative driver, Nvidia driver, and I'm already at like 560ish if I remember right. I just reinstalled the Nov 07 releaseto see if it has in fact gotten better. Nada so far on the memory issues. Once I start adding in firefox, music, utorrent, that number spikes hard.

Thats a bit of a blanket statement though Vashy. I can take a PC from 6 years ago and run most any game today as well. But the graphics will be max low, and it'll crash more then likely.

Pretty good actually.

Yeah but my ratio is the win, rofl.

I did actually just see some places with the e6750 priced lower then the e6600, weird. As for folks who whine about warranties, if you OC, and you actually have decent cooling, you're not going to need the warranty unless you take the chip out and rub it wrong side down on sandpaper, lol. It's pretty idiot proof, especially with intel pulling the genius move of LGA-ing their chips. I can't even think how many chips I bent or lost a pin on while lapping.

 

From my perspective supporting small businesses with my side company, Vista is a real pain.

One of my clients is a used auto dealer. The guy likes his toys. His machine is a HP Pavillion with 2gb of ram dual core processor, touch screen. Basically it is a nice high end consumer machine that a non-computer type would walk into your typical big box retailer and walk out of the store with.

At the same time he picked up 3 new dells with the XP Pro "downgrade" only half as much ram, but comparable processors. The performance difference is staggering.

Watching that vista machine boot is painful. Trying to fix the quirky problems that arise like drive mapping issues that the xp machines have no issues with are even more painful.

My other client got a new laptop shortly after Vista was released and before Dell offered the go back to XP option. It only has 512mb in it - more pain. Has a pretty label on it for vista certified.

My opinion is unless you have a high performance rig the features and bells/whistles Vista offers don't yet offset the loss of performance on a medium range machine. Hopefully, service packs should tackle many of these issues.

As to an earlier question about what it's going to take to get people to switch to vista - the applications. Notice that Office 2007 only loads on XP or Vista - 2000 is a nogo. I reckon the next version will be Vista and higher. I don't see Microsoft trying to push games for the PC as hard (after all they want you to buy their X-box 360s and the games for that platform).

They'll count on people getting tired of having to send emails, "Um could you resend that excel spreadsheet but save it in the 97-2003 format first. We're still using the old office...."

 

Negative. They're pushing HARDER. Games for Windows ring a bell?

One of their selling points right now for the 360 that they mention nonstop is Vista review ads to game companies and in 360 mags, is they plan every game that is playable multiplayer for the 360, to be able to cross over with Vista. Its getting off to a slow start thanks to Vista flopping, but if it's realized, it will make the console the one to get if you prefer to play on a console instead of a PC.

Considering the coding is stupid similar with only a few variations having to be made, mostly in bandwidth and video pipelining, porting a 360 game to a Vista game is supposedly simple.