[icel0rd]

Well, I had some serious issues with XP at the beginning, but never with APM. It used to crash on a regular basis when it used the included drivers for my Radeon 8500 card. It took me a couple hours to get it stabilized trying to beat the crash to install the right combination of drivers to get the thing stable (without gaming).

When I got it to boot to a stable state without touching a game, I thought I was golden, and dropped my games down on it. The damn OS kept crashing no matter which driver combination. I tried all of the following:

AGP 4x/2x, fast writes and write combining off
Tried every single driver for my video card (the correct way)
Fail safe settings in the bios
Disabled all extra interfaces: USB, parallel, serial.
Ripped out the Sblive due to reports of the 686b via southbridge/sblive issue
Tried different memory timing settings
Tried replacing the memory stick
Tried a new PSU
Tried a new mobo (which use different chipsets),
Tried a few bios revisions on both boards.
Tried many AGP drive values
UNDERCLOCKED my video card

It used to croak by blacking out and rebooting, and then later on, I'd get the infinite loop crash. Well, everything worked fine on 98SE, so tossed that POS XP out the window and dropped 98SE back down on my machine, put the latest drivers down on it with AGP fast writes off, and everything was rock solid.

What have I concluded? I loved the new XP features with the built in firewall, not as many security holes if you let it lock itself down, and the stability it could offer if you didnt want to 3d game with one of the latest accelerators (previous generation cards were fine). I really don't like 98SE, but its good for what I want to do.... GAMING. I can actually enjoy crash free gamging on 98SE. XP sucks ass for gaming compared to 98SE IMO.

With all of this said, I still have to say that I LIKE Microsoft operating systems. I have run most of their OS lineup over the years from dos(an IBM rip), win3.1, 3.11, 95, 95osr2, 98, 98SE, NT 3.5(1), NT4, Win2k pro, win2k AS, MSTS with metaframe and winframe, and XP.

Microsoft brings an acceptable degree of compatibility and useability to the table that no other OS can offer. Yes, I'm aware that it may not be the most stable platform (depends on a number of things), but it is by far the most useable. Its popularity fuels developement for it. You can find almost anything you want for the windows platform these days, and even my mom can use windows and click on an icon to run a program. Why people hate Microsoft is beyond me. People have choices, and the right to exercise them. If you dont like windows, the ease of use, the amount of development for it, and the somewhat limited interface (from a tweaking standpoint), then run something else and have fun trying to find the programs you want to run on it. For those who say that Windows is not the platform for a serious user, I say bull$h1t. It's a matter of what you need to do and what a product has to offer to help you do whatever that is.

Sometimes I wish that something like Linux would become as popular and supported and developed for as Windows so that I can change my OS. I like the amount of control you have over it. That amount of control is and probably never will be available in Windows. Unfortunately, at the moment, its not a viable choice for me. There isn't enough developement for it (gaming specifically) for it to be something I would run. I LOVE the tweakability it offers, but short of using it to run a server, I wouldn't drop it on my desktop.


Oh well, I figured I would share a few blurbs with you regarding this.