sounds like XP is more of a lease than a purchase...


if i buy something, shouldn't it be mine, to do with as i please?

set a cup of coffee on
play frisbee
break in half and do nasty things with the hologram
teach my dog fetch
microwave
plunder
pillage
hack
crack
or even, god forbid, hang from the rearview mirror in my car
?

Aj forgot some: "hello", "girlfriend's name" "123456", "qwerty".

JavaBrain...you almost got a flame from me....
I've used WBXP already and am really taken by the integration....it's one plus FOR using XP...though it MUST be fully compatible with LiteSTEP or I will be staying with 2K...

Paxx - What Tomb Raider? The only one that I haven't tried in XP is TR1, and the rest work fine for me. I'm running a Geforce 2 with the 12.41 drivers (which are XP compat.)

Dork - Read the EULA on any software that you buy and tell me how much it all sounds like a lease. The CD itself is yours, but by accepting the EULA (on most software) you are entering into a "lease" type of situation/agreement.

And please, for the sake of integrity, stop using the little dollar sign for the MS initials. Yes, they make money, but so does $un, Linu$ Torvald$, Larry Elli$on, and yes, even $tardock... I haven't read the posts which contain it because I've learned from ZD Net's corny "TalkBack" section to filter them out. 9 out of 10 times those who use the dollar sign for the name/initials are bashing Microsoft, and really, that's a tired, old bandwagon.

Hum, I guess people write it M$ because M₣, M₤, M₧ or even M€ doesn't really work...

Not to sound like an angry old man or anything (so, ok, maybe I do) but I live in the USA and it's my right to bash whomever I choose. If you choose to filter my posts rather than reason with me, that's certainly your decision.

I've been around this business for a LONG time and Microsoft (I didn't say I wouldn't try to cooperate) has been bamboozling people for many MANY years. I remember when tried to reject computer vendors their Windows licenses if they offered any other OS on the machines they sold. This is one in a long line of problems I have with them.

I don't hate Microsoft (wow, that's twice now!), but I sure as hell don't favor them either.

I may be just a smidge prejudice due to the fact that I was such as OS/2 fan and it WAS the better OS.

DaWebMassa: With all due respect, MS couldn't care less what hardware is on your system. And even if they did, they wouldn't know it's YOUR system. It's simply a verification system to make sure that when you buy their product it's only used on one computer.

I don't like it either, but not because I'm worried about MS knowing what hardware is on my system. It's not like someone at MS is saying, "Look at Tarkus -- he has an Iomega CD burner, a Microtek scanner and an HP DeskJet. Wait till the guys in product development hear this!"

hoverboy: Bravo!

Tarkus, I meant software... there have been rumors (yes, I know RUMORS) about them collecting info from the registry on what software you're running.

well I shall fill my registry with ascii pornographic imagery. That'll learn 'em.

DaWebMassa: It would probably be trivial for someone with a port scanner to see what info they're collecting. And activiation happens so fast, it's extremely unlikely they're collecting much if anything from the registry.

Also, given the consequences that could result from such devious actions, I doubt very much if they'd want to take the risk. For what purpose?

I'll just file this next to all the other unfounded conspiracy theories.

XP crashed?!!!!

it hasnt crashed once for me in over 2 months!

another point, what major problems are there on XP?!!!!!!

oh, another point (yes another), i bet 99% of all u ppl use one piece of MS software every day. so stop complaining, be happy for once. Oh, and by the way, Internet Explorer is far better than Netscape rant rant flame flame

Berzerka, the only problem I've noticed so far is that XP seems to load multiple versions of the same services during boot-up, causing it to use more memory than it otherwise would. For example, I have five--yes, five--instances of svchost.exe running according to the Processes tab in Task Manager. I can't figure out if this is by design or a bug, but they total 26 MB of memory being used.

Typically, I'm at 80+ MB of memory in use after a fresh boot. That's a little bloated, but not such a big deal in this age of ultra-cheap RAM. (I just wish I had a newer motherboard that could support 256 MB chips, so I wasn't capped at 384 MB...)

Besides that, I haven't seen any problems. My games and other programs run fine on it. It's pretty. It has some nice informative features that make computing a little easier. It's pretty. Things are laid out a bit more conveniently than in Win2k. And, finally, it's pretty.

As for Product Activation, it saddens me to see so many people still fall for the same sort of anti-MS rumormilling that's been going on for so long now. Sure, they're anti-competitive. They've broken the law. And they'll eventually pay the price for it. But they aren't sneaking into your computer to collect all sorts of trivial, meaningless info about their users. The Activation uses ID and Serial Numbers from your hardware to form a unique code that gets tied to your Product Key as an anti-piracy measure. No personal data; not even a convenient way to tell *what* exactly you have installed in your system. And no Reg keys. It's really no big deal. I think some people have watched the Anti-Trust DVD a few too many times...

If I don't end up with a free copy of the finished product from attending the XP Roadshow this Fall, I'll fork over the money. I like it *that* much. And damn, it's pretty...

I still don't understand what there is to like that's worth 200$ or 300$ or whatever they'll overprice it for. Nice, transparent icons are nice, but not worth that much...

Well, for me, it's pretty simple. I hate Win9x; the crash and destroy rate was *way* too high for me on that whole line of OSes.

So I ran Win2k. But a lot of things I wanted to run (especially games) didn't jive well with Win2k, so I was SoL.

Along comes WinXP, with the stability and recovery features of Win2k, but compatibility that exceeds by far even the Win9x line, bundled with a host of easy-to-use (and easy-to-find) tools, and a much improved interface (even without all the Luna stuff). I guess for me that's worth the $200 upgrade price.

YMMV.

Hmm... I guess, whatever rocks one's boat. I know I would disable just about every WXP feature. Which leaves me two reasons to upgrade from Win2k: transparent icons and possibly being able to play the Tomb Raiders games (the only game I can't get to run on Win2k). Dunno, but for me it's not worth the money. I'm not saying I'm not eventually gonna try it out, I'm just saying I won't pay for it.

Paxx - I did a little testing this morning and was able to get every Tomb Raider to run, however, I only tried this on a Geforce 2 GTS. Also, TR3 and TR4 each required a patch, but XP's nifty "Compatability Mode" switch enabled all of the others to run great.

btw - which TR are you playing? I Started playing TR4 (Last Revelation) in January and liked it so much that I went and bought the previous three and decided to finish those before I played TR4. I'm about 2/3 or the way through TR3, which is by far my fav so far.

I'll not further this "war" but conclude by repeating the immortal words of the infamous Hippy... "Bleah!"

misterME (shouldn't that be misterXP ):

The multiple svchost.exe listings in the Task Manager is not a bug. The same thing happens in Windows 2000.

It's not the same service running multiple times, either. It's a generic name for Windows services. That just means you have a lot of different Windows services running.

If you want to cut down on this 'bloat,' then stop some of those unneeded services from running. Here is a site that will give you a good head start (despite being written for Windows 2000).

http://www.3dspotlight.com/tweaks/win2k_services/

hoverboy, I started with the original, then I totally loved it so I bought the second one when it was released, and so on.
I was in the middle of playing TR3 when I changed my OS from Win98 to Win2000. And could never continue my game cause it won't run on my machine. I even aso have Last Revelation sitting on the shelf still in the wrap. I checked on their website and they clearly say that although TR MIGHT work on Win 2000 they do not support it. I took my chance and sent them an email, and they basically told me they couldn't caer less if it doesn't work on Win2k. Last time I checked, there was no patch available.

Thanks, Tarkus.

I don't know if I'd simply optimized my install of Win2k better, or maybe it just used more descriptive names, but I never recall seeing svchost.exe more than once in Win2k.

I'll check that site out, though. It would be nice to know what's gobbling up all my RAM after boot, and get rid of that which I don't need.

XP is the best.

Paxx - I have a patch for TR3 that *may* enable it to run on your 2k machine. It a compressed TR3 executable.

http://communities.msn.com/MarkRabold

It's in the files section, under games/game patches/tomb raider 3. It replaces your current Tomb3.exe. I think this is what I had to use to get it to run in Win2k. This file was widely available at Eidos.com but now it's a bit difficult to locate there.

You may need an Passport to get to the file

Thank you Hoverboy, I'll give it a shot.