Sager 2092 + XP Pro + DX10

Is this a good combination?

I have a lot of scientific programs (chemdraw, SPARTAN, etc.) that work great on my current XP Pro machine.


I would also like to do some gaming. Crysis, COD4, Bioshock.

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

there is no DX10 for XP

it is only available for vista

 

... for now anyway.

SP3 brings everything that is good in Vista to XP.... now thats left is DX10.

...which would render upgrading to Vista useless.

 

not yet anyway...

Alky Project should be done by summer

and the Wine project just started on dx10.1

 

thanks for the quick replies

 

is alkyproject still using the cpu to do some of the processing? or is everything now done by the GPU?
what is going to happen now that the project is closed?

 

All of the games you mentioned work fine on XP, I would stick with it since it is working fine for you now. If you want to try Vista, do some Googling and make sure the programs you need/want to run work on it.

 

I thought that was a foregone conclusion in any case.:wink:

 

Vista will be the new Windows Me

 

No, that's not true. Do you have anything to prove that?

 

I dunno, I was monkeying around with an old D'h'ell system I bought back in 2000 that had WinME on it, and ME fired up lickety-split, which reminded me of the old canard about how a frog in a pot on the stove will never notice it's being cooked if you turn the temperature up slowly enough - it's amazing how accustomed we've become (ok, at least I have ) to monumentally slow boot-ups, even on a lean-n-mean WinXP (I know, contradiction in terms, right ) installation with all the bloat taken out.

It seems to me that Vista isn't even the new ME, Vista is ME 0.5 - the funky overgrafix-ed beta version of ME that was slimmed down in order to create the production WinME that we all know and ... well, "love" isn't really the right word (... even "like" doesn't really do justice to sentiments about ME).

 

I really liked Windows Me. It was and still is my favorite OS from the old days. It's 2008 now, 6 years after XP and a few more since Me, but it was a very decent OS in my opinion. I never had any problems with it and I liked the fact that it had NT elements. NT was so blamed that people got scared of it and yet now we (Windows users) all have it.

 

What I loved about ME was the ability to "quick boot" to fix problems in DOS. And was better than 98 and 98SE, I still have ME on an ooooold computer

 

Speaking of which - any good ideas on how to recover WinME from an ill-advised attempt to install a linux variant over the old ME install on a laptop, specifically, a Compaq Presario? I've already tried the so-called "restore" CD Compaq included with the laptop, to no avail, and both my ego and my curiosity have stopped me from paying HP $25 to get a set of proper recovery CDs.

I've poked around on the hdd with some of the file-recovery apps I could find and DL for free and most of the ME installation still appears to be there (you know, the ones that promise to show you everything on the hdd for free, but require payment before you can actually recover anything - not that that's unreasonable, but I'm cheap ). Mainly, however, I wasn't entirely sure what I needed to recover, and whether I could recover the entire partition or if I had to go file-by-file.

Any suggestions?

 

I can't figure out where all the Vista hate is coming from. It seems to have some pretty useful features and reasonable boot time, and all the extra graphics desktop stuff can be turned off. It doesn't interfere with gaming anyway, since it's "suspended" as soon as desktop loses focus due to gaming.

The idea that Vista uses too much RAM is a myth--it just uses that to index Search and update SuperFetch when your computer's not in use. As soon as you start using it, those are turned off and RAM is again released for your use. The only thing that makes me uncomfortable is that it might wear down my components faster since they're in use more often, but again I can just turn it off permanently.

There are some problems like slow file copying and *really* slow unzipping, but we'll see how SP1 fixes that.

Also a problem is the lower framerate in Vista/DX10 -- this to me seems to be a driver support issue, and for that you might blame Nvidia / ATI for not crafting proper drivers after over a year.

MS definitely could have released a more stable product on release date, but I think at the very least we should wait a bit longer before crucifying Vista.

Edit: Also my main complaint with ME was that it seemed very unstable. I don't think I've had a Vista crash yet, but of course it's only been 3 weeks

 

Did you try formatting the hard drive first? That way, you get a completely clean slate, and all data is effectively erased.

 

Nope, I got sloppy/lazy/bored/in-a-hurry, and so I just installed a copy of NASLite directly on top of the old WinME installation.

I've since used some trialware recovery utilities, several of which were able to see what looks like most or all of the old WinME installation (although I didn't try pulling any copies since (a) trialware recovery apps won't copy - you gotta pay (only makes sense), and (b) i didn't want to stuff what was there by doing anything else intemperate with the drive.

The stupid "recovery" CD Compaq shipped with this thing isn't actually a real recovery CD, apparently, it's basically a boot CD that then looks for a special hidden recovery partition on the hdd that Compaq sneaked on there (and people wonder why their hdds are always miraculously smaller than advertised, even after taking into account the fact that "as advertised" GBs aren't really gigabytes). If the CD finds enough (or the right) WinME files, it then jack-boots the system off the hidden partition (as near as I can tell). Compaq actually got sued for this, and lost big time, as a result of which they had to provide all of the class members full, proper recovery CDs - unfortunately, I think I missed that memo and now it's stale.

As I'm writing this, I think I'm going to try delicately wiping off the NASLite install (perhaps with Acronis Disk Director, which I finally broke down and paid for in order to partially revive my departed VAIO - more on that later ) and then putting the de-NASLite-d hdd back in the Compaq to see if the "recovery" CD has any better chance of finding the requisite WinME files.

Part of my reason for wanting to get ME back on the idiot Compaq is that none of the Linux installations I tried was able to handle the half-assed ACPI BIOS Compaq put on this thing - somehow , MS got an extra-special backstage pass and was able to kludge ACPI support on this thing despite the bum ACPI BIOS.

Now, to pontificate a little more - given that Compaq was one of the prime movers behind the ACPI standard, you would have thought (silly you ) that if anyone in the universe could properly implement ACPI, that person would be one of the founders of the standard itself. Nope. Sorry Charlie (remember Charlie?)
(courtesy of Wikipedia, as seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tunacharlie.gif . None of my doing, and I ain't trying to shill anything - I just remember pore ole Charlie from the good ole days of golden tv - only three channels and nothing on).

Nope, Compaq apparently muffed it big time on the Compaq Presario 1700T series, as Linux reports it as a "nonrecoverable error." Basically, the DSDT (which stands for Differentiated System Description Table. It is a part of the ACPI specification and it supplies configuration information about a base system, thank-you [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSDT#DSDT_.28Differentiated_System_Description_Table.29]Wikipedia[/url]) is bollixed, and can't really be used sensibly to implement ACPI.

Functionally (or, as we used to like to say all the time when I drove city buses - where the rubber meets the road), what I notice is that I get very, very spotty fan control under almost any Linux installation - since I want to use the Compaq as a file server (i.e., hidden away and on all the time) - not having adequate fans is almost surely going to mean http://www.drugfree.org/image.ashx?...20-bb60-fdd903d579b4&Manipulation=fit*200-200 vis-a-vis the processor in the Compaq (much better use of that image than "this is your brain on drugs" - dontcha think?).

By-the-by, just in case you haven't yet decided that sorting your sock drawer would be more interesting than finishing this (admittedly) off-topic post, I feel compelled to announce that I have (for the time being) brought the vaio back from the dead, and I learned one neato little fact in the course of doing so - you can boot from a hdd that doesn't initally have a drive letter assigned to it - I sort of thought that would happen since the boot syntax (look in boot.ini - unhide hidden system files, then open it with notepad or something similar), but it's nice to see it actually confirmed. Mind you, I did this with a hdd that I had just duplicated with Acronis Disk Director, and Acronis did stick it's head in at boot time to "check" the partitions, so it may have assigned a drive letter at that point. Still it's kinda neat to know I can do that.

BTW, the reason it didn't have a drive letter assigned is because I copied the lone original c:\ drive while it was still in the carcass, meaning that I couldn't assign "c:" to the newly minted copy, I was going to assign it "d:" but I figured that, if that assignment stuck, I'd by up s**ts creek w/o a paddle since it would never properly boot (everything being referenced to c:\ on the installation I'd just copied).

Ok, ok, If you made it this far, you really are bored/life-less (that is, you ain't gotta life), so go sort your sock drawer now.