Going back to XP32...

[j0j081]

if you are picky about drivers booting both is always an option. I personally love it. I just scrapped my old printer and I never use my tv card anyway.

[TierMann]

I just switched back to XP Pro SP2 32bit also.
It was a nice OS... a little faster/smoother, but all the little annoyances added up.

-The Samurize taskbar "toolbar" wouldn't work with 64bit explorer.
-Some install programs from "InstallShield Software Corporation" (ones with the red box icons) wouldn't run with nView Desktop Manager running.
-Couldn't launch 64bit apps or control panels from 32bit shell replacements.
-No option to show/hide desktop icons in the context menu. (worked around it with 2 reg files but still) That and the above problem limited my customization.
-I was limited in hardware choices because of driver support.
-File permissions got messed up more than once (between installs) and I wasn't able to read/write to my storage.

32bit is running nicely with AMD drivers, dual-core MS hotfix and reg fix.

On another note too, I'm using 82.12 drivers in 32bit and havn't had any crashes/reboots/BSOD's like I would get with any 80's series in either OS.
I think something has changed with the drivers in this version because it even acted up differently in 64bit.

[Riptide]

I agree Tiermann x64 edition is definitely a nice OS. Speedy, smooth, less updates to load when you finish installing it, highly compatible w/32bit programs, etc..

But yes the annoyances added up after a while, most of which weren't MS's fault.

-StarForce games won't "just work". Some won't work at all. Most needed a crack.
-Some games (Doom3 ROE) require .msi file modification before they will install.
-Certain programs work but were flakey for me. Newsleecher "access violations" were much more common w/x64 edition for me.
-ATI x64 driver was messed up when it first came out. Blew up WDM support. This is fixed now.

[jAkUp]

nForce 4 and Intel chipsets have integrated SATA drivers, so you do not need the F6 drivers to install SATA devices. Most VIA/SIS based boards do not have integrated SATA drivers, so you need the F6 drivers.

[Riptide]

How does a chipset integrate a driver? :confused:

I know w/NF3 I had to load SATA support or setup wouldn't see my discs. Odd that a later version, the NF4, wouldn't need a driver via F6 then.

[npras42]

How does a chipset integrate a driver? :confused:

I know w/NF3 I had to load SATA support or setup wouldn't see my discs. Odd that a later version, the NF4, wouldn't need a driver via F6 then.

The same way that it makes your CD-ROM bootable and more recently made USB keys and the like bootable without drivers... (this ain't a sarcastic comment as it sounds... I don't know how that ^ stuff works exactly but it has slowly appeared as MoBo features, and it seems the same has happened with SATA).

I just realised that I built a PC for my friend a month or two back which had SATA drives and it didnt need any kind of drivers either. That was on an nF4 MoBo.

[rflair]

How does a chipset integrate a driver? :confused:

I know w/NF3 I had to load SATA support or setup wouldn't see my discs. Odd that a later version, the NF4, wouldn't need a driver via F6 then.

On my DFI250GB NF3 board I've never had to load SATA drivers on windows install, xp32 or xp64, not for hardrive support anyway. Come to think of it with my old NF2 board no SATA drivers were needed to recognize the hardrives. Although if you were running some type of SATA or PATA RAID array then drivers would probably be needed at install.

[Riptide]

Yeah it was a RAID array. That still doesn't make much sense to me though. If there were built-in drivers for just straight SATA then why not the RAID as well? Many times it's the same controller anyway.

[Lfctony]

Same here, didn't have to load SATA drivers for the A8N-E, maybe it's an Asus thing.

[Darkoz]

nForce 4 and Intel chipsets have integrated SATA drivers, so you do not need the F6 drivers to install SATA devices. Most VIA/SIS based boards do not have integrated SATA drivers, so you need the F6 drivers.

jAKUp is correct, most recent Intel chipset boards (around 18 months and newer) and nForce 4 (and some earlier models) chipsets have integrated SATA controllers which do not require a seperate driver to be installed during setup.

SIS and VIA chipsets on the other hand are a pain in the rear end and require you to do the F6 routine.

[nV`andrew]

jAKUp is correct, most recent Intel chipset boards (around 18 months and newer) and nForce 4 (and some earlier models) chipsets have integrated SATA controllers which do not require a seperate driver to be installed during setup.

SIS and VIA chipsets on the other hand are a pain in the rear end and require you to do the F6 routine.

glad u posted this, because the SATA drivers on my floppy disk wont even load...

anyways i didnt know that you could set affinity on Windows XP x32 Home...but you can. I can't get enough of dual core. Was installing Steam and hl2/soruce, browsing internet, and talking on msn and aim all at the same time and cpu usage was under 25%

maybe it is a eVGA thing ;)

[AliceCooper]

Just installed XP64 and I am very impressed.

My ASRock mobo came with 64 bit drivers so after install all I needed to do was load the CPU X64 driver and Lan driver. It may be a budget mobo but it does what it says on the box..32 & 64 support!!

Ran the Nvidia 64 driver and new Creative driver and all worked great. I am dual booting because I still want to game on XP32.

Loaded Far Cry 64 bit and HL2 and they look very impresive and load much quicker. MS office 2000 works well so overall no complaints.

I would even recommend this OS!!!

cheers

[Son Goku]

Good to hear, you got this working and all.

BTW, for future reference, if someone runs into a problem similar to this; there are ways to deal with NTFS partitions outside of Windows NT/2k/XP... It can be a pain however, if one isn't able to use setup...

- One method I used in the past was DR-DOS 7.03 allowed me to do this. The only issue was it's implementation of FAT 32 was limited to 8 GB HDs. (Yes, there are multiple versions of FAT32, and DR-Dos doesn't use the same one as win95 SR2 and latter.

Given my HD was 9.1 GB I'm not sure what it would do. Hopefully it would see unknown partition type of a larger type. It couldn't partition something that large, but could clear it. I don't know as I hadn't run into this. It was good at deleting NTFS formatted partitions however, and a

fdisk /mbr could clear out the NT boot sector as well, letting one do whatever with the drive...

- A win98 boot disk, is also a possibility, for clearning an NTFS HD, and given it supports FAT32 and large HDs, there's a chance for fdisk in it to clear large partitions of unknown type.

- Disk management tools in a Linux installer. Given many distros can both recognize NTFS partitions, and even read them, they won't show up as unknown in the disk management tools, and if push comes to shove, it might be possible to wipe the partition out of the partition table on the drive, from here...