My New Windows eXPerience

As most of the regular here know I am basically an anti-Micro$haft kind of guy, but, in my studio I use it, as it is hard to get Wavelab and Vegas to work in Linux *sigh*. So, in my valiant effort to stay current I have recently upgraded to Windows XP, and, as a whole I have to say I am quite impressed.

My first go at it I went the upgrade route from Windows ME, which worked wonderfully, all my hardware, with just one or two exceptions, upgraded flawlessly, and all the software that I tried worked great, there was only one problem...

For starters, my system drive has been a 6 GB/7200RPM Seagate hard drive for a long time now, since it only holds Windows and my apps, I have never had a need for a bigger one, as I usually ran with a couple GB free. All my audio and video is stored on my second hard drive. After the upgrade I had NO free space, my virtual memory even took a beating. I usually run 1280MB Virtual Memory setting, that's 2.5 times the amount of RAM I have, which is the usual recommended. Never let Windows manage your virtual memory, always hard-set the size, Your hard drive will love you for it.

so, after beating around in XP for a while seeing where everything is in the control panel, and stuff, I came to find XP is very stable (for Windows anyway), pretty fast and has lots of neat features. Most of which I will never use in a studio setting, however.

After realizing that I like the OS, I decided to do it right and wipe out the ol' C drive and install XP from scratch, and ya know what, after install XP fresh, and installing tons of software and all that, I am back to my 2 or more GB free on my C drive?!?! Is the upgrade really that sloppy?

However, it is still stable, and after spending 2 or 3 hours RAS'ed into my company network downloading all the XP patches and stuff it was still rockin'!

I had one very weird problem that I must share. When installing Waves Native Power Pack, it freaked out my system, as some of you may know, the Waves NPP has to install some sort of driver or key on your system, then reboot and then install the NPP, well, after installing this the driver never went away, and it wound up hogging IRQ6, which my floppy drive wanted and it erred out. It took me two hours to hunt down the source of this mysterious device that is interfering with my floppy drive controller, and after I found out, needless to say, I was pretty upset, but my system now works, and works well.

I love the new start menu in XP, the fresh new look is nice, it finally looks modern and inviting. Getting at system settings and the control panel is easy, it has actually been great fun seeing what they did and actually made a new operating system instead of just adding some new features to Windows 95, which they have done for the last 2 or three OS's. This one actually feels different.

And it ain't often ya hear me say good things about Micro$haft, but thus far I am pretty pleased.

And that is my brief overview of my WIndows XP experiences so far...try it and judge for yourself.