This will come as not much of a surprise to those of you who really know me, but this is finally, the LAST XP straw.

And yep, this has been brewing for some time, as I made the basic move away from XP to the Alpha versions of Longhorn/Vista waaaaay back in early 2004, I mean that's FOUR years working with various versions of this "new" OS

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In the past couple of days I've been thinking a lot about all the negativity surrounding Vista, what people think about it, about how Microsoft and Partners have failed to come up with an easy applicable upgrade strategy, good for everyone, and all the needless pain this has caused.

Believe me, in these past four years I've seen it all, and yes --- I DO realise that the radical decision I made back in 2004 to jump straight from 98SE to LH 4053 then 4074 with XP purely as a token safety net has made it a HECK of a lot easier for me to work with, work around, and work happily with Vista, as I have been able to make small, incremental, and strategically wise upgrades to my computer systems, instead of having to face the trauma of major Windows upgrading all at once, and all the attendant hardware-trashing and sheer grief that a LOT of people have been feeling...

And honestly, I really do sympathise with all the grief, and I am honestly dismayed at some of the deep mistakes that Microsoft has made implementing all these changes, no matter how necessary they may be.

UAC just sucks ; enforcing x64 driver signature requirements was just plain dumb, and I am so happy that these last at least appear to be going the way of the dodo, except for a few unlucky sods owning certain pieces of evil legacy hardware ; RTM was just FULL of some pretty serious bugs, I mean I could use the LH 4053 about 80% of the time, LH 4074 was up to 93-97% depending on which week it was ; but as soon as the LH 5xxx builds appeared, I found myself relying more and more on my "token" safety net, well, at least up until the point where I managed to build my first x64 system, and XP Pro x64 came along...

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Having said that, my uptime with Vista since the SP1 builds started coming out has shot right back up to nearly 100% --- and honestly, I can hardly regret having to wave my hanky at XP's departing ship...

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Here's why ...

... my mobo has been slowly fading away, and I needed a replacement ; and because I prefer, and will possibly always prefer, AMD to Intel, I decided to get myself a cool new AM2+ Asus M3A motherboard. The goal eventually is to stick a non-buggy Phenom quad-core into this thing, but in the meantime I've got myself a Sempron LE 1250 --- bang-for-buck-wise, this CPU just rules, is dirt cheap, and is at least 20% faster by itself (not to mention the DDR2 vs my old DDR1) than my old 3200+ Winchester

So, perfectionist and beta tester as I am, I decided to try out my XP MCE 2k5 on this rig ... Meh!

Setup 'n' all was really fast, but once I got to desktop I couldn't help but notice the sheer lagginess compared to the x64 Windows versions that I'm used to. I was meanwhile unenthused at the prospect of reinstalling all the software etcetera...

But, try as I might, NO sound

The Asus M3A actually has HD Audio (that I'm listening to right now BTW, but NOT in XP ), and because of this the mobo, which is the best, the most elegant I've had since my first LH 4053/4074 PC133 SDRAM pseudo-hunkajunk, is therefore XP-incompatible for my needs. So that's it then --- NO MORE XP for me either on this rig, because XP just does NOT work on the computer, nor on my Acer laptop which is happily running a Vista Home Premium x64 setup, beta tests and constant reinstalls notwithstanding...

XP is just too much grief for me at this stage --- no bang, and not even any buck.

I find it ugly, clunky, slow, annoying, and just plain useless.

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So long XP, I hardly knew you --- oh btw my new "safety net" is XP x64 SP2 (inherently unnecessary, as I just use Vista instead ) ; a Windows version which, as everyone should be aware, is not really XP at all, but a 64-bit client version of Windows Server 2003 ; oh, and it's also kinda like a Longhorn 40xx, but without the bugs

Interesting, thanks for the heads up on the ASUS M3A. I assume it's because of a lack of XP drivers for your sound?

No, HD audio simply does NOT work in XP --- you need either Vista, or a 64-bit earlier version

XP drivers for HD audio are provided on the installation CD

Anyways, off to watch a DVD --- NOT possible on my rig in Windows XP

Congrats! It's high time to move on to the latest and greatest

(Breaking up with XP was particularly satisfying for me)

JabbaPapa wrote:

No, HD audio simply does NOT work in XP XP drivers for HD audio are provided on the installation CD

LOL OK then. I looked at the M3A when you mentioned it in the other thread and it looks like it's perfect for me. All the features I would think I need are there and it's a nice price @ $100 CDN. If I'd wanted SLI then the board sells @ $250 CDN and as I rarely game, not the new ones anyways, there is no point in getting that. I will probably get an 8800GT but that's about it for my Phenom build. I may also get an x-fi board too if there's enough cash left.

Just curious, Jabba, can you give more specific reasons why you hate XP?

As far as your hardware troubles with XP goes, that situation was much reversed for many of us and ended up with that kind of trouble on Vista.

I think we both agree on the fact that MS made some really radical, and quite frankly, absolutley ludicrous design decisions in Vista. And honestly I've been using XP for years, and I've been fine with it. Sure, I never liked the desktop being rendered in slow 2D with the CPU (clunky, like you mentioned) and I would love to use Aero on Vista all the time. But it has compatibility issues with video players, it's sluggish, has to toggle off when playing a game (flashes the whole screen black every time) it just doesn't feel right.

I dual-boot XP and Vista all the time but, as tired as I am of XP after all these years, there's always something stopping me from being able to just wipe it off my HDD. Whether it be the horrible sound drivers I have to deal with in Vista (a big deal to someone who loves music and listens every day), to an aero interface that compounds input lag, to horrible 3D performance degradation in many games i play on a daily basis, lack of features in nvidia drivers (Yes, even after a year!), watching media in WMP 11 with gray bars in fullscreen, Having to manually choose the SORT BY TYPE and SORT BY MODIFIED options in EVERY d*mn FOLDER I go into, inability to disable ClearType because the whole OS uses Segoi UI which can't have ClearType disabled on it...

... The list is endless, some small and some big - but the kicker is many of these things will be never changed and many people like me will have to painfully deal with them. It's a shame MS made these changes, then many driver and hardware companies just dropped the ball and made the problem that much worse (Creative anyone)? So for many people it's something like:

[OFFICIAL] My [dependency] with Windows XP can NEVER END (even though I'd like it to... as much as I waited for vista all these years)

Weird...I've not had any issues with HD Audio in Windows XP since it was introduced. At one time one needed a MS patch to get it working but most driver software has included the patch for years now

Well, doesn't work on my own desktop rig --- and sorry, no screenies to prove it, as I no longer have the OS installed

--- but I would qualify that statement if I were to rewrite it today, and state that HD Audio is not 100% XP-compatible, and in some cases can even fail to install correctly...

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Otherwise, the overall reason I dislike XP is probably because I gave up on 98SE literally days before getting hold of an old Longhorn 4xxx build, configuring it for use as a Main OS, and basically just falling in love with LH/Vista as a better replacement OS than XP.

I mean, I find Vista more intuitive, more responsive, that it uses hardware much better than XP ; and also from a Support POV, when Vista is broken, it doesn't pretend to be functional, unlike XP

I find XP to be a shoddy compromise of what the post-W2000 Client OS should have looked like.

Not to mention the fact that, like W2000, XP is inherently unstable, due to the fact that it has been designed up from a Server OS that was designed to recover from serious I/O failures, without even informing you that those failures have taken place.

Vista can be harder to install and maintain than XP, but at least it doesn't try to pretend that your hardware issues are non-existent and unimportant.

I feel like you are taking in the Twilight Zone, where everything is backwards. Right now, Windows XP is considered to be the best Windows desktop operating system available by almost everybody.

As I stated before on this forum, I hated Windows 98SE and considered it the worst computer experience I have ever had due to its inability to operate effectively most of the time, so when Windows 2000 came out I had to get it. Granted 2000 didn't work with all the games, but I gamed on my Playstation, my Dreamcast, and eventually my PS2. 2000 ran so smoothly and crashed a fraction of the times that 98SE did.

So when Windows XP came out, I immediately got my hands on it and it was the perfect replacement for 2000. Everything worked because the drivers were the same, heck, the OS was fairly identical. So for me, switching to XP was much easier than someone that was switching from 98SE or 95.

Since switching to XP in the middle of 2001, I have never been more satisfied with an OS and even after Beta testing LH/Vista, XP has not been topped (IMHO). I rarely have ever had Windows XP crash (Bluetooth has been the major culprit with crashing in my experiences) and XP has been reliably fast for me ever since I started using it on my first Pentium 4 in 2001. Previous to my P4 I had it running on a Pentium II 400MHz and it was, understandably, a dog.

So, when you are calling XP unreliable, we get confused. If Vista is reliable for you, Great! I am glad someone can use it to its full advantages (I would love to have Ready Boost on XP), but since most people that try Vista would prefer to go back to XP due to compatibility and reliability issues, we (or at least I) get confused when you call XP "inherently unstable".