I'm doing a spring clean of my PC over the half term holidays. I'm currently backing everything upto DVD (just burning the 20th DVD now). I will be re-installing Windows after this, and I want to know whether you think I should go for XP 32bit Pro or XP 64bit Pro? I've resisted 64bit before now because of driver incompatibilities, but that was a few years ago, and the hardware in my PC is a couple of years old, so surely it should have 64bit drivers. Thanks for your input! Thomas
Ive heard nothing but bad things about xp 64bit, compatability wise, i ran it once and once only, if going to the trouble go to vista 64 it seems to have better support. But really the only reason for going to 64 as there are no 64 bit apps or games as yet is if you are going over 3.5gb of ram, I see you are on 2gb at the mo so if that aint changing any time soon i'd say best to stay on 32bit xp, easily the most stable and supported OS of all time IMHO
Personally I'd say either go for Vista 64, or wait for Windows 7 if you're looking to upgrade. Or if you're sticking with XP and just running 2GB of ram, I'd agree with ferg, and just run the 32bit version.
Thanks! I did the re-install yesterday, and XP refused to install, so I installed Vista 32bit. Used it for about 2 hours, got really annoyed with how slow it was, and had another go at re-installing XP. 4 hours later, I finally got it to work by disabling my RAID 1 array . Even when I loaded the drivers from a floppy in the installer, I kept getting a BSOD.
Getting any hard drive errors in event viewer? You can check SMART error counters of all hard drives in speedfan (see sig) Um are you still using a maxtor and a samsung in a raid??, should always match the hdd's exactly for maximum stability.
It's probably my own fault the RAID isn't working... When I was messing around unplugging hard drives, one of the SATA cables got caught in the CPU fan. I started the PC without realising, and after wondering why all errors were flashing up in the BIOS, and why the BIOS settings had reset, I realised that the fan wasn't spinning. The smell of burning was a give away aswell :doh: So I pulled the cable out and went into the BIOS setup, and the CPU was 130 degrees celcius (266 Fahrenheit). Luckily the CPU still works, but that was the point where I kept getting BSOD's. I tried each stick of RAM, and the error was exactly the same, so I assume they're fine. The only way I can get rid of the BSOD is to disable nVidia RAID in the BIOS. And my RAID array was a Western Digital 500gb and a Samsung 500gb. My reasoning behind this was that if both were from the same batch, then they might have a defect and die at the same time, which would defeat the object of a RAID 1 mirroring array XP seems to be running fine now, and both HDD's are recognised. I'll check the SMART errors (if there are any), but I think the BIOS is supposed to show them. Instead of my RAID 1 array, I'll write some software which copies everything that's changed from one HDD to the other every day. Not quite as good as a RAID 1 array, but better than no backup
