I've found it to be much more stable, faster, etc. on my machine. The speed from the rewritten networking stack alone is worth the price of admission (almost). I know a lot of people seem to hate it, though, so I don't know if it's just the applications I run, the hardware I'm using (dude, it's a Dell), or just luck.
Except for a rather major problem. (Here we go.)
I have an nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra AGP and added an ATI All-in-Wonder PCI card. First time I installed XP, it worked great. Then I tried re-installing XP (with all the crap I load on there from time to time, it's easier -- even easier would be not to load crap, but where's the fun in that?). With both video cards plugged in, it couldn't activate the nVidia. I had this problem with other versions, where you have to boot up with only one card attached at least once, before adding a second card. So I removed the ATI, and the nVidia worked fine. Then I plugged in the ATI, and the nVidia stopped working.
I removed the ATI permanently, since I preferred being able to use the more powerful nVidia card to watching TV on my PC. The nVidia worked fine by itself for a while, but then, for no apparent reason, the nVidia stopped working. (640x480x4 screen resolution and the ever-so-helpful Code 10 - Device could not start error on the card.) About 2/3 of the time, that would be the state when I powered the system on. The remaining 1/3, it would come on and the card would start normally.
Sometimes, when the card was not starting, I could coax it by uninstalling the card from Device Manager, rebooting, letting it redetect the card, rebooting again, and it would work. (I count myself blessed to have a 1.7GHz machine that can actually boot Windows in under two minutes.) When that failed to work anymore, though, I just removed the card completely and replaced it with a Matrox G400, which has been working just fine.
I'm reasonably sure I have a bad card at this point, that it's not XP; but I'll confirm that when I get time to putting the nVidia in another system to see what happens. |
