WinXP anyone else using it?

[Andrew Pratt]

I installed XP last night over my win98 partition. All in all it went very soothly with all devices except my TV Capture card being recognized. My inital thoughts upon seeing the new GUI is the it sure looks like a MAC OS and its sometimes hard to find familar items but once you get used to it its not that bad. I was very relieved at its ability to transfer over settings from my win2K partiton...a few minutes later and I had everything I wanted..emails, favorites etc were all brought over in a few easy steps. I'll be playing more tonight but so far its ok. I have a few programs that won't run on it (nav2000 for one) but I'm looking at accuring a newer version of that program.

[Bing Fung]

Andrew, So it does allow you to setup a dual boot system? Sweet!




Bing

[JonMarsh]

I've worked with a couple of the beta's and RC1 for XP; it's been so busy recently I haven't finished installing DVD codecs and some other necesssary bits on the drive used for XP testing; plus, that system (an early Athlon with an ISA slot) has pretty much become a dedicated CLIO test system.

Initial impressions are favorable, and I've gotten some pretty fair results with the Media player 8 after installing a codec from SoftDVD. What I'm really waiting to see is an installation with the new ATI boards and players; so I've basically set this aside until October.

My daughter likes it a lot, and wants it permanently on her desktop; me, I'm still using WIN2K for my main desktop, and 98SE for the gaming rig and bedroom HTPC. I don't think that will change, because drivers for XP and WIN2K still aren't all that hot for gaming. In 6-12 months that could change a lot.

WPA is another matter, one I don't care for at all, because I'm frequently upgrading and changing around systems. Maybe I just need to change those evil ways, and concentrate my activities in more productive areas?

Best regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[Jariten]

Memememememe!

I am using the XP Pro corporate..
so far ..no problems...I also have the Plus! Pack installed

this is currently running on a PII 350 with 196Meg Ram...^^;;;;

[JonMarsh]

Out shopping around last weekend, you can get XP in the stores now, if you're buying a new computer- many already have it installed. Several laptops at my local Best Buy, for instance. Still don't like the blue task bar. Unfortunately most of the laptops still have kind of so-so video chip sets- though that will be changing a bit in the next few months. Radeon mobility is supposedly already available in Europe on some Dells.

Regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[Bing Fung]

I have been pondering weither to purchase XP or not. The Home Edition seems like a step down from W2K, no log in to 2000 domains, no dual CPU support (A person never knows when he may want to exersise that option ), no backup and automated recovery, no dynamic disk support, however HE is $80 bucks cheaper, and I never used most of those features of 2000 Pro.

HE seems like a detuned, crippled W2K Pro.

Thoughts?




Bing

[JonMarsh]

You've hit the nail on the head; the home edition is a deliberately crippled version, with feature reduction to make it more equivalent to ME or 98SE. Don't forget no SMP on the home edition, also.

My take is mixed; at first blush, seems like the sensible thing to do is get the Home edition for my daughter, and if I decide to play with it more on one system, or use the firewall and networking features more seriously, get the "Pro" edition, which I'm running now. I could upgrade that to an MP system, which is an intriguing way to get all kinds of horsepower at your disposal (dual Athlon's, anyone? cheaper than a single high end P4, you know).

The shop I generally buy stuff from locally has had OEM XP for sale since Oct. 5th, but I've been so busy with work and the M8 project that I haven't had time to worry about PC's. The M8 project has taken an interesting direction, into a rather new crossover concept that's very promsising, so I may *not* be publishing all detail here or on Tom's site, but I'll send you mail later next week if you'd like to fill you in on the salient details.

If you're a WIN2K guy, I think you'll be happier with the Pro version in the long run, and pricing is comparable. But for buying licenses for secondary systems, I can see the "Home" version making sense.

Regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[Bing Fung]

I think your right Jon... XP HE for my daughter's PC would be a good choice, however, I think I would want the Pro XP (I'm kinda crazy that way). I just needed to bounce it off somebody.

What do the test's of the M8's new crossovers reveal? Must be some good tweaks

I would still be interested in building a set of tower mains sometime in the future and still am very interested in the M8's as a tall tower with lot's of drivers (I'm kinda crazy that way) :W

Certainly send info my way...

I have been exclusively working on my PC of late. I suffered a broken stripe in my RAID 0 array and basically lost everything. It was due to one of the 40 Gb drives, that eventually crapped and would not format. So I have scrambled to get the system back up on 1 drive, only to have W2K run like crap, with constant lock ups. So, I'm at the point where I'm running only bare bones Win ME until my drive is returned, then I'll format and set up the whole schbang again. The performance hit with out the RAID 0 stripe is very noticable, as such, I'm contemplating rebuilding it, but this time in a RAID 0+1 (Striping + Mirroring). Of course this means I must buy 2 more 40Gb drives to perform this operation (4 drives are needed), however, that's a small price to pay for performance with data integrity. Put another way, I would pay $400 for all the photos and information I lost

I may just well thump along on W2K Pro before purchasing, until service packs are released for XP (wait a second, they still do that for XP? :W ) or use a beta XP until then.

Jon, the XP version you are using is the Beta RC1? I take it it is a Pro variant? I should be getting a copy of XP beta soon, hopefully it is the Pro or RC1 version.




Bing

[JonMarsh]

Yup, it's hard to put a price on data. I've been using magneto Optical disks for online and transfer storage for years, because I don't trust hard disks very much- I've had a couple of Maxtor's die on me, and one IBM- which was a surprise! So I've been in the habit of backing up to my MO's they way I back up to my network drive in the office.

The last XP build I've worked with much was RC1- I have been meaning to pick up the OEM build, but just haven't gotten around to it. The only attention my deskside workstation has gotten is more RAM.

What I hear is that they won't do service packs for XP- it's that "live update" stuff from the web. Makes me shudder, personally. IS won't stand for that stuff, either, so if they want to sell it into corporate, they're going to have to have service packs. We're still using NT4, mostly, with a few directors and special cases on WIN2K. One of the IS guys and I brought up an XP machine on the network, as an experiment, and it was a lead pipe cinch- its wizards pretty much automated all the setup, once we supplied valid domain credentials.

The crossover thing is interesting- while I was thinking about optimizing a two way system with a low crossover frequency, I got to thinking back about some papers I've written about Class D amps, and the output filter designs I used. For them I found an elliptic filter was very useful- they have a steep slope, and a near total zero in the response before they pop back up up again a bit, before rolling off completely. (I described the application of elliptic filters to Class D amps (using our FETs, of course!) in a 1992 AES paper.)

The trick is tuning an alignment of elliptic filter to do what you want, without creating other problems. Last week I came up with a two way alignment using high and low pass filters which had one more reactive element (coil or cap, depending on LP or HP) than a standard 4th order Linkwitz-Riley, but which has a 48 dB/octave roll off (eighth order equivalent) for the first 35 dB of roll-off, and a stop band "bounce back" that was under -40 dB. Beautiful summing, even off axis; good phase characteristics with reasonable group delay; a very flat impedance curve (relatively) through the crossover; and great characteristics for minimizing out of band tweeter excursion (read: low IM distortion), and great attentuation for stiff midwoofers- you can tune the "null" to the top end driver peak, without requiring another notch filter in many cases.

I'm pretty jazzed; it simulates great on the computer with driver data, and tomorrow I order parts to build them and test it this week. I think I can build the M8 with this approach even with Focal Td120dx2, as well as the TD5. For the MB or Accuton tweeter or others like it, it's a leadpipe cinch, of course.

Stay tuned for developements.

Best regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....