XP For Hardware?

Why does THG have an article titled "XP For Hardware" that hardly talks considerably more about the software side of XP and actually doesn't answer any of my questions about how XP handles hardware at all?

Confused minds want to know.

-Intelicide: The act of marketing overriding engineers to kill a product before it can be released.

Oh, I agree. It was just that the title and opening statements didn't in any way match the rest of the article. They could have just titled it, "A preview of Win XP", and I would have been happy.

Though I'm still concerned by any OS requiring that much RAM as a minimum... I guess M$ hasn't ever heard of optimization.

Then again, that's pretty obvious as PowerPoint stores all images in giganto-bitmap format even though they may have been just a tiny gif imported.

-Intelicide: The act of marketing overriding engineers to kill a product before it can be released.

Last I heard, the minimum RAM requirement was 128MB. Which means I'd have to get a system with 256MB just to run any of my software because the OS would already be eating up 128MB of that. Gratned, if I got a new system, my minimum would be 512MB anyway. Still, any software that needs 128MB as a MINIMUM has got some serious memory optimization (or lack thereof) issues.

And the worst part is the more I hear about WinXP, the more options I know I'd turn off if I ever had to use it just because they'd drive me nuts.

-Intelicide: The act of marketing overriding engineers to kill a product before it can be released.

[LOL]

I have little faith that WinXP could pick up the hardware I have correctly. I seem to have a knack for finding components that are difficult to find drivers for and that Windows often detects incorrectly, if at all. I still haven't found any Windows drivers for my old ThrustMaster Mark II FCS.

So I'd highly doubt that WinXP could detect my hardware properly. Thus I'll need some form of manual control over setting up my hardware. Does WinXP have this? Does it let you remove drivers that Windows has chosen and add your own drivers for your hardware? Does it let you set specific IRQs?

The article didn't cover any of this simple information about how WinXP handles hardware, and these are concerns that I'd really need answering before I'd even consider upgrading.

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I'd kill to have 100% DOS backward compatability in a Windows product again. I have plenty of old DOS games that won't even run because Microsoft decided to stop supporting some of the Assembler interupts in Windows.

I just don't get it, why would it be so hard to write into Windows a DOS emulator using DirectX where you have a 100% backward compatability, SB16 to DirectX emulation, and a speed adjustment? Then you could run any DOS software under Windows without flaw, and you wouldn't need all of the crappy half-arsed support that is in Windows currently.

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With the exception of Microsoft’s stupid licensing and registration crap, I’m very pleased with XP rc2.

I’ve installed it on a couple of systems including components such as:
Adaptec 7780 Dual Channel SCSI
Creative Labs AWE 64
Vortex PCI audio card
Intel BX motherboard
AMD 760 motherboard
Matrox Millennium G200
MSI TNT2 32MB Video
HP 8100I CD-RW

And a bunch of other stuff, both old and new, name brand, and OEM.
XP detected and installed every piece of hardware without prompting me for a driver disk or anything.

I was very pleased with its hardware performance.
Also XP runs just fine even on an old 450HMz PII w/128MB RAM it does slow down a bit when running multiple logins or software emulation, but no problem keeping PhotoShop 6, Word XP, and the internet open.

It runs very smoothly on a 1.2Athlon and 256MB!


- I got a board too: http://www.impactsites2000.com/cgi [...] nboard.cgi

Yeah. Windows shouldn't have DOS functionality anymore. Hardly anyone these days even knows how to do anything in DOS. So I don't have a problem with M$ canning that. However if they do that, they should also make a DOS emulator so that people who do use DOS can still use DOS.

Heck, I'd set up an old system as a purely DOS machine, except that my M$ DOS 6.22 floppies have died. I once tried setting up a dual-boot DOS/Win95b system, only the instructions that I had gotten from M$ failed to mention that minor detail that Win95b natively uses FAT32, so all of my HDs were FAT32 formatted. Thus when it went into DOS mode, it killed everything as DOS only knew FAT16. It took me a while to get that system restored because I was stupid enough to not test my emergency floppy first, which had gone bad. It took taking my system over to a cousin who had working boot floppies to fix that mess.

I miss a lot of my old DOS games. Sure the graphics and sound suck, but they games themself were fun. Heck, EarthSiege 1 was a lot more playable than ES2 ever was.

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