I have just been floored by Windows XP

[Kevin]

I was fortunate enough to get a new Thermaltake Silent Purepower 480W Power Supply, Antec Case, Asus A7N8X-X motherboard, Athlon XP 2800+, 1.5GB of PC2700 RAM, and an HP dvd420i DVD burner for $70 (most of that was for the PS, the rest was a dump of 'old' parts from a coworker).

This has replaced my old XP 2000+ with 512MB of PC2100 RAM. I decided since I pretty much had all my data backed up already and since all the really important stuff was on a second partition to just move the drive from my old A7M266 board to new one. I well aware that XP doesn't redect IDE controllers after it has one, and I got my immediate system reboot when it tried to fire up XP.

So I put my XP with SP2 integrated CD in the drive, booted off that started the install. It detected my current install of XP on the system and asked if I wanted to repair it. I said, sure figure I would end up back at that screen in 30 minutes telling XP set-up to format the partition and then install. I was wrong. The repair worked. 20 minutes later I was logging into my account. I used my USB drive to get the latest nforce drivers from NVidia, installed those and had the new network card, audio and everything else working just fine.

All my applications run without a flaw there isn't really any left over crap in the registry (it actually wiped old hardware entries in the registry). I just had to download a few updates from MS that were release after SP2 and do a reboot.

So what I was thinking was a 5 hour reinstall of OS and apps turned out to be 30 minutes or so because the XP repair function actually works. I'm really floored by this. I'm happy, but I'm floored.

[jahcs]

Yay!

So far I have been impressed with Windows XP. It's much better than previous systems from Microsoft.

[JustAGuy]

I was fortunate enough to get a new Thermaltake Silent Purepower 480W Power Supply, Antec Case, Asus A7N8X-X motherboard, Athlon XP 2800+, 1.5GB of PC2700 RAM, and an HP dvd420i DVD burner for $70 (most of that was for the PS, the rest was a dump of 'old' parts from a coworker). 

This has replaced my old XP 2000+ with 512MB of PC2100 RAM.  I decided since I pretty much had all my data backed up already and since all the really important stuff was on a second partition to just move the drive from my old A7M266 board to new one.  I well aware that XP doesn't redect IDE controllers after it has one, and I got my immediate system reboot when it tried to fire up XP.

So I put my XP with SP2 integrated CD in the drive, booted off that started the install.  It detected my current install of XP on the system and asked if I wanted to repair it.  I said, sure figure I would end up back at that screen in 30 minutes telling XP set-up to format the partition and then install.  I was wrong.  The repair worked.  20 minutes later I was logging into my account. I used my USB drive to get the latest nforce drivers from NVidia, installed those and had the new network card, audio and everything else working just fine.

All my applications run without a flaw there isn't really any left over crap in the registry (it actually wiped old hardware entries in the registry).  I just had to download a few updates from MS that were release after SP2 and do a reboot.

So what I was thinking was a 5 hour reinstall of OS and apps turned out to be 30 minutes or so because the XP repair function actually works.  I'm really floored by this.  I'm happy, but I'm floored.
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Hey, I have that same motherboard. It was a replacement for a Gigabyte motherboard (which had lots more features). XP was able to recover easily from that motherboard swap without problems. That whole "Microsoft = Microsuck" stigma that is perpetuated by nerds (I say nerds in the nicest possible way, after all, I am one) is really hard for some people to get around. They think that Microsoft Windows is still as crappy as version 3.11 and 95.

I've used Microsoft Windows since 3.1, WFW, and higher, since they were introduced, with very few problems, and definitely no show-stoppers. With that said, XP Service Pack 2 sucks. It sucks HARD. I used it for about a day on the laptop I bought, before wiping the thing and starting fresh with SP1. There's such a huge irritation factor there, not to mention the whole anti-p2p socket hack they added to limit peer-to-peer file sharing (they claim it wasn't for that purpose, but we all know it was). I won't get into specifics, but SP2 really blows hard.

As for the motherboard: beware. The one I bought had sub-par on-board LAN, a LAN connection that would fail intermittently (so I stopped using it, put a 3Com 905 card in, pretty sweet). The on-board audio just failed last month as well, but where there's smoke, there's fire; the whole board might go at any minute, really. It could be that I just bought a crappy one and it's too late to return it. Other than the on-board failures, it works well. I have 1.5 gig of RAM installed with a Athlon XP 2100+ installed. Works well, enough.

Good luck with yours.

[HowGozit]

Yah - XP is a very good version of Windows. Although don't get me started on Internet safety... Thats a bit ripe due to a couple of design decisions (ordinary users should NOT be administrator level users...) ;)

I've pulled that stunt that you have on about 3 upgrades. In most cases, it works fine. Watch out for a few peripheral driver issues (usually with USB 2 hub controller drivers).

Even if you reinstall Win XP into the existing windows directory - most of your programs will still work fine.

Even more oddly, you get away with a lot when you pull the same trick with Win98. You do have to have a pretty, er, robust (lunatic) attitude towards nasty comments from the OS, but I've upgraded from an Intel BX (Compaq) PIII motherboard to a VIA 266 Athlon XP1700+ motherboard and CPU (and changed the video card and had to reset the boot tracks on the drivewhile I was at it) and all was running fine after about 2 hours - no software reinstall required. I don't really recommend it though - quite a hairy practice with Win98. :blink:

Linux Just works. (My main PC runs Win98SE, WinXP and about 4 variants of Linux on a mutliboot setup). Never had to change a thing - detected the hardware on startup and reconfigured on the fly. - As long as the video was the same (on my main puter - it was).

HowGozit

[Walkiry]

Even more oddly, you get away with a lot when you pull the same trick with Win98.  You do have to have a pretty, er, robust (lunatic) attitude towards nasty comments from the OS, but I've upgraded from an Intel BX (Compaq) PIII motherboard to a VIA 266 Athlon XP1700+ motherboard and CPU (and changed the video card and had to reset the boot tracks on the drivewhile I was at it) and all was running fine after about 2 hours - no software reinstall required.  I don't really recommend it though - quite a hairy practice with Win98. :blink:
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Heh, I pulled that off in Windows 95. Changed Motherboard, memory and processor, and the system would only boot in safe mode.

Enter in safe mode, go to the hardware manager, and delete every single device from the list (up to and including things like CMOS clock and the bloody processor).

Reboot, and watch as the OS detected everything. Cursed at me a couple of times, but in the end it was up and running ^_^

That aside, the repair install of Windows XP is indeed very robust. I wasn't as impressed with the recovery console though, I much preferred popping a Knoppix CD in when I had to fix low level stuff.

[Guest]

I like XP. It may not be perfect but its good.
I always felt the older Windows performed at an unaceptable level. Especially the tendency slower and slower operations over time.

[Alrin]

I like XP. It may not be perfect but its good.
I always felt the older Windows performed at an unaceptable level. Especially the tendency slower and slower operations over time.
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Ugh, don't get me started on Win9x.
They were horrific. Sure, win95 was a huge leap from 3.1 but ... stability was like trying to balance a large set of fine china on the tip of a knife, while participating in a camel-race in Iraq.

<shudders> Nowadays, I never get any computer downtime. I can have my machine on for weeks. My record was 23days and 4hrs roughly. And that was because of a power outage in a thunderstorm. Ofcourse, I dont fiddle around with the computers setup as much as I used to, so that may be a contributing factor.

[DeeBye]

There's such a huge irritation factor there, not to mention the whole anti-p2p socket hack they added to limit peer-to-peer file sharing (they claim it wasn't for that purpose, but we all know it was).
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Can you elaborate on the "anti-p2p socket hack"? I've used various P2P utilities to move large amounts of data both before and after installing XP2, and I haven't noticed a lick of difference.

edit: DOS 6.22 was my favourite OS :(

[Obi2Kenobi]

I don't remember which version of DOS I started out on, but it must have been back in '93 (as soon as I could climb up into the chair, do some math, and speak real English [as opposed to "I wanna ee ceweeo!"]) or so... When was 6.22? Bagasaurus... that was an awesome game. ;)

[Wyrm]

If I remember correctly, 6.22 was around '90/'91.

Don't get yourself too excited about Windows XP. A while back I was having some stability issues with my HDs booting ability (I think I deleted a few too many things from the registry...) and when I went into the repair console and ran checkdisk it said there didn't appear to be any problems so it wouldn't bother with a full scan. I ran it again and forced a full scan; before it had even climbed to 1% it had found errors. After having to do this a few times on subsequent bootups, I went into Device Manager and scheduled Windows to do the most thorough scan it could of the hard drive. It spent several hours fixing bad sectors and the like.

[Obi2Kenobi]

Yay!

So far I have been impressed with Windows XP.&nbsp; It's much better than previous systems from Microsoft.
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Better is not good. It's hard not to make something better when the previous versions were at rock-bottom. But then again, Windows has managed to dig, on occassion...

I seem to recall this being some psychological thing, where people (in general) value an improvement more than being good to begin with.

[jahcs]

My only frame of reference for operating systems is 1980's Apple II, 1980's Macintosh, enough MS-DOS to save and run programs, Windows 3.x, Windows 95, and Windows XP. Stating that I am impressed with XP when compared to previous systems from Microsoft is the truth. I don't believe I ever stated Bill Gates or his development team members can walk on water. And the "Yay!" was reffering to Gnollguy's success with his repair install function.

[JustAGuy]

Can you elaborate on the "anti-p2p socket hack"?&nbsp; I've used various P2P utilities to move large amounts of data both before and after installing XP2, and I haven't noticed a lick of difference.

edit: DOS 6.22 was my favourite OS&nbsp; :(
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The socket "fix" that Microsoft introduced was two-fold. First, they removed raw socket support (they removed the raw sockets API!). So, any program that used raw sockets, instead of Winsock or BSD sockets, gets borked. Second, Microsoft added a time-out feature to outgoing socket attempts. They introduced a queue that limits the number of outbound connections to something like 20 at a time. Any apps that do more than just 20 connections at a time are crippled or broken -- lots of bittorrent clients, for example.

Some conjecture: basically, Microsoft was trying to reduce or eliminate hackers and attacks on their systems. What they ended up doing was pretty heavy handed and had the byproduct of cutting bittorrent down at the knees, as well completely breaking apps such as the network security scanning program Nmap. Very quickly, some "hackers" came out with a fix to the affected DLLs, and most apps that were broken have been fixed by now.

They removed a whole API, and when people complained about that, their response was, "don't use those programs anymore."