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Journal jawtheshark's Journal: Howdy ya all! + Ask Subset of Slashdot: Windows Drivers 12

Journal by jawtheshark
I've been waiting for this date (9 september) to post a new journal entry since it would mark exactly one month since my last entry. I've been back since about a week and a half and took something like a "vacation after a vacation". Why? Because organized trips are extremely exhausting and I was glad to be back after three weeks of China. Instead of reciting all I did in the last four weeks, I'll just give my impressions about China:
  • Very interesting place... Great culture
  • Generally nice people, but they understood "Capitalism" very quickly. The monetary budget I had foreseen for spending has virtually tripled (damned tips, which are *mandatory* there)
  • Chinese toilets suck! Majorly... Having diarrhea for the last two weeks doesn't help
  • Honeymoons don't go without fights... Being 24/7 with your loved one brings up tensions.
  • (in relation to above) SmilingGirl and me have a very different concept of "Souvenirs". For me it is T-Shirts and Postcards (for sending to friends). For her it is "Everything Else". Resulting in bulky baggage and "overweight risk" for planes. Thanks to my 31337 packing skills I managed to stuff all her bulky souvenirs in our baggage without exeeding the 30kg allowed on planes. Of course, the exessive weight was on *my* back in *my* handbaggage.
  • Don't go to China in August: Rain season... Need I say more? *sigh*
  • The Li river is gorgeous. The Three Gorges, less so.... May have been due to the rain in the Three Gorges
  • 55€ for a 1Gig CompactFlash. Whooohooo! (Okay, I found that they are only 80€ here now... They were over 100€ before I left)
  • Main impression of China: Hello!!! Postcard?!?

And now for the "Ask Slashdot". I've been managing the computers I've neglected for the last half year (due to my new career). I decided to replace mowgly (which you know as willekens.lu and was a P-I 166Mhz, 128Meg RAM machine) with the current desktop of my family. As you might recall, the family computer (baloo) died in April due to disk failure and I failed to reinstall it because of lack of time. This machine was a P-III 800Mhz, 768Meg RAM... Still very nice for a desktop for medium usage. I removed all IDE devices from the P-III and then I ripped out the SCSI adapter, SCSI disk and SCSI CD-Rom and 100Mbps NIC of the original mowgly, plugged them into the P-III. It booted up like a charm. (Okay, I did backup... but I wouldn't have needed to, if I had known it was plug 'n play. OpenBSD ROCKS!!!)
After the erver was serving (Duh!) I built the "new baloo". I purchased a new ASUS motherboard, a AMD64 2800+, 1Gig of RAM and a new case. Plug in the IDE devices from the "old baloo" and there you go: baloo is dead, long live baloo ;-) That will be the desktop of my family. Since my brothers new machine has Windows XP on it, I thought that it would be time to upgrade to Windows XP. So I installed Windows XP on that machine...

Now comes the "Ask Slashdot". Windows XP virtually recognised all hardware except the Audio card. Now, for the graphics card it is clear: you need to replace the driver.... but for all the rest? I mean: I got a driver disk with the motherboard. Why would I use it except to install the Audio driver (which wasn't detected by XP)? Still it's got chipset driver and NIC driver (that don't seem to do much except change the name in the Device Manager). Why would I want to install them? I installed, but frankly, I don't see *any* difference. Worse: I installed XP and then *all* drivers and then Windows XP started to reboot all the time (not a BSOD, it gave me a window that it was going to shut down in 15 secs or so, and it can't be a virus because it wasn't even connected to my network... and even if it would have, my network is secure) I suspect the Cool'n Quiet driver to be fucked up. I reinstalled XP and installed all drivers except those and I have no problem whatsoever.
For graphics drivers I usally go to nvidia.com (or ati.com, but I have very few ATI cards) and get their latest driver. They always say one should get the driver from the card manufacturer. I trust those less, that's why the CD of the graphics card manufacturer never got into to CD player of baloo. ;-)

Anyways: what do you do:

  1. The CD's I get with the hardware are tuned for my hardware. I exclusively use those!
  2. I get my drivers from the respective manufacturers, I download them and install them. NIC, Graphics card, Sound, all of them!
  3. I use the Windows drivers for everything except the unsupported stuff and graphics cards. For those I use the CD
  4. I use the Windows drivers for everything except the unsupported stuff and graphics cards. For those I download the latest drivers from the manufacturer or if that is not possible use the CD
  5. I use the Windows drivers for everything. All hail Bill!
  6. I use a Mac you insensitive clod!
  7. I use Linux you incompetent bastard!
  8. [Other option not listed above]

Obviously I'm a partisan of #4.

Oh, and before I forget. A kind soul made my wedding pictures available on a faster link with thumbnails and all! This person calls him/herself "Fata Morgana" and I have no idea who it is. You have my greatest thanks.... For those who are interested, the site is here . Errrm, still... how do one logs into geocities. I've got a username and a password but all I seem to get on login is a yahoo account... :-/

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Howdy ya all! + Ask Subset of Slashdot: Windows Drivers More

Howdy ya all! + Ask Subset of Slashdot: Windows Drivers

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  • I don't care enough about my windows machines to dick around with a bunch of unsupported crap. The microsoft drivers usually work, and if it's not a performance-sensitive device in a situation where the performance is important, I figure I have better things to do with my time than tweak.
  • those are definitely a driver issue. and i never use the ones on the cd rom either. ALWAYS go to manufacurer website read the info on the 'updated' drivers... generally you will get Much better IDE performance, etc, however quite often newer motherboards will have stability issues etc.

    and i have a feeling that your soundcard drivers are the problem, try removing hardware on them, and then seeing if you BSOD. it sounds like you have a bad (eg: crappy) sound card driver that doesn't get approved by microsof
    • Well, I reinstalled XP and the issue didn't come back. Sole difference: the Cool N' Quiet driver that I didn't install. Oddly enough, originally, I downloaded a driver from AMD and it bluescreened the machine. I reverted to the MS drivers, then installed the driver on the CD and then the odd behaviour started. (This odd behaviour was not a bluescreen, but it ended up in rebooting anyway. I always disable "restart on bluescreen") After reinstall and not bothering with Cool N'Quiet at all did the trick.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • You're welcome for the postcard. :-D It has become a bit of a tradition by now, eh?

      I came home monday last week, and I did lurk around a bit. I wanted to see the outcome of the "btzlu2 project", and I skimmed over journals of some people. Not everyone, but yours was on the list and so I indeed know that you have a new job. I can only say: Excellent! You deserve it :-D I understood you got an Apple laptop for the job, right?

      As for the PC thing: you're in the #6 crowd. I didn't expect you to answ

  • You seen this [microsoft.com]?

    This is Belgian (Dutch)...you can pick another country here [microsoft.com].

    That's a lot of software for business evaluation purposes. Nice price, too.

    And yes, being with someone 24/7 brings up tensions. Next April will be 10 years for me. You, uh, get used to it. FWIW, first year might be toughest. And the seventh I would rank next toughest.
    Enjoy.
  • My idea of souvenirs - all the local foodstuffs and drink I can possibly carry. There's a reason why I lift weights ;-)

  • So, how is China!! :)

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