NaughtyNu

1 Ghz Athlon 512 megs SDRAM 133Mhz GF2 MX card SB Live 20 gig Maxtor/40 gig WD drive Windows XP Clean Install ...still runs horrible. Just before the weekend my system (which ran very very nicely) started to run badly. Booting up used to take a minute or so, which was replaced with a 5 minute brutal chug-a-thon. The hard drives would constantly access, bringing everything to a crawl. The mouse which I've noticed in XP always runs smoothly no matter what you're doing, stuttered and barely moves whenever I try to do anything such as open an ICQ window or hit the start button. The only thing I did was install the new Star Trek Bridge Commander demo. Nothing else. Tried defragging the drive overnight. Congrats, this drive is fully defragged, dispite that the system is still struggling to do anything. So I formatted the partition and reinstalled. Now...same thing. First thing I did was disable the UPnP server, get Zone Alarm, do the Windows Update thing, changed virtual memory to 400 megs, grabbed Tweak XP, checked all the memory optimization settings and rebooted. Still runs badly with the hard drives chugging everything down. Can anybody explain to me why it does this while my Win98 install in it's own partition runs perfectly fine? And can somebody explain to me why literally overnight this happened without me doing anything? Anybody have any suggestions/ideas, keeping in mind that the settings I mentioned WERE running perfectly before and then the next morning it's all garbage?

Actually I found that if you tell the Mixer that you have 4 speakers, 4 speakers will be used. Imagine that? Just wanted to point out that with those official drivers there is a chance you can get all four speakers working. Woot

Thanks for the reply. This is the sort of info that I'm not sure about and need to know This is also what probably buggered me up before too - the defragger basically ignoring/not paying enough attention to the main system files. It somewhat explains why Win98SE ran better and WinXP ran worse no matter what I did with it. I'd rather not have to try out SpeedDisk because like I mentioned it's not in my possesion and it is a child of Norton. You mentioned that XP's included defragger can't do FATx at all or not that well? I'm running solely with Fat32 since NTFS5 didn't really run any faster for me and when something did go wrong with an earlier beta I couldn't get at the partition from WinMe (had that installed at the time.) So, what's PerfectDisk like?

Alright...just a couple of quick questions: XP's defragger (Diskeeper version whatever) should do the job, even if it also buggers me up? And I know somebody who can lend me his Nortan Systemworks 2002. That says every MS OS out there with the exception of Dos 6 and Win 3.1. Somebody mentioned to stick with the NT/2k defraggers so is this new one ok when used with XP?

Throne of Darkness is the new Pool of Radiance right? That thing is plagued full of bugs including the now (in)famous install and it takes out half your \Windows directory error. I'm really hoping they're making a large and stable v1.1

So it's not really Liveware 3 then? I guess we're still waiting for the official link and files on Creative's site....damn!

It's a self extracting zip which creates about 1400 files that look like an install that came from Liveware 1

What about those drivers on a Geforce 2 MX? 21.81 ran horribly worse than the previous leaked drivers so I'm scared to run these ones

Yeah I'm curious how they run! The 21.81 drivers for both my 98SE and XP ran slower than some 14.xx drivers I've been using

I have a good question about defragging and Windows XP. Everytime I use the built in XP defragger (Diskeeper 6 right?) my XP is so bogged down with the hds constantly chugging away at something yet my 98SE (I'm dual booting) runs better. It chugs so bad that the only thing I can do to fix it that I know of is to format the XP partition. Why does defragging my HDs make XP chug? They're all using Fat32

First thing, I got Win98SE and XP installed, a 20 gig hd with a 2-3 gig partition for XP and a 40 gig and 512 megs of ram (woot). A couple of days ago I thought it's been awhile since I defragged so I thought I would overnight. I rebooted to 98 and used the Defragger out of it since it has an "All Drives" option and everything is Fat32 anyways. I wake up and reboot to XP. XP is now chugging horribly. I mean chugging badly. The arrow turns into an hourglasss constantly and just moving it about it will pause ever couple of seconds. And this is just an empty desktop, nevermind trying to run a game of something! So when I went out last night I let the WinXP defragger get a hold of my C: drive (where the swap files are for both OSs) and then tried it out when I got back. It was better but it's still pausing and the hds chugging. So I set up to defrag the WinXP partition while I slept with XP. No improvements at all. Ironically 98SE is now running a tad better. Without formatting the XP part and reinstalling, what can I do? I ran into a problem like this before with an earlier beta of XP but didn't think anything of it because I had a newer build to play with

Actually it's not Microsofts fault. Blame the people like Logitech and Creative (esp. Creative.) If anything you should thank MS for making basic drivers period. Yeah, the SBLive driver that comes with XP is pretty lame and basic but at least they made a driver. I'm still waiting for Creative to make Win2k drivers that are as decent as the Win9x as they promissed they would with the Prince of Vaporware called Liveware 4... What a lot of companies do is say they don't want to work on drivers for an OS until it's finalized so some companies will either start on drivers when the XP code is finalized (from the news it looks like before the end of the month) or even after it's on sale in stores. Or maybe some companies are just slow to finish them as Nvidia's newest drivers which should be out this week actually have native XP support in them for once.

SOmebody (can't remember who, sorry) on here said to snag the SBLive 2k 5.1 driver upgrade on Creative's page, remove the SBLive WDM and Gameport drivers, run the 5.1 install from a Dos box with a /w and when the install asks about something incompatible you stop the install, the install keeps going and after a couple of reboots XP works with Liveware and EAX on all speakers... I tried doing that with my fresh install of RC2 here. When I run the 5.1 install from the Dos box I get a window saying that this program is not compatible with XP. Is that just a fancy warning or does the Win2k 5.1 drivers no longer work?

In RC2 you do the same thing as in RC1 - Sound Properties and change the config from desktop speakers to Quad speakers. Worked for me anyways

I used to have the KA7-100 mobo. Only reason why I stopped using it was some freak accident where it and a 128 meg of ram somehow got 'toasted' for lack of a better term. Once in awhile after a day of using XP the system would freeze up, the HDs locked up or something. I installed the HP370 Win2k drivers and the problem went away. This might of been with with the KA7s and older XP betas though. Just a warning in case it happens to anybody