WIn XP cant post

[Waccoon]

I have Win2K, and my dad has XP.  My machine seems much more stable than his.

USB sucks on all vesions of Windows.  It could just be a problem with the drivers you have for your motherboard.  Drivers run in kernel mode and can easily cause the Blue Screen no matter what Microsoft does.  I seriously think many crashes are unfairly blamed on Windows when drivers are the culprit (nVidia comes to mind.  Their newest drivers SUCK!)

[Waccoon]

They contracted VAX to bring NT4 up to the same level as Windows95. Later, Microsoft put their mits on and pulled and yanked at the sources.

Are you sure it was the same people who wrote VAX?  I do remember that Microsoft commisioned several companies to collectivly write the NT5 core under Microsoft's direction.

All I know is that I have used Win2000 for well over a year and never had a USB problem or any other type of problem thats with all the IE 6.0 and Windows 2000 patches installed, but as soon as I tried Win XP home edition with all the IE6.0 and XP pathes I could not post on here.
No idea why it just happens that way.

If it acts like you're not logged in, it's a cookie problem.  If not, it's a firewall problem.  Althought Win2K and XP have IE6.0, the defaults for cookies are set up differently, and, of course, XP has a built-in firewall, while Win2K does not (I prefer a router for a simple firewall, personally).

But it was the IRQ_USB_Lessthan or some error message like that. Its been forever since I got that error message.

Yup.  That's a driver-level error.  Do you have a VIA chipset?  They are infamous for that.

Last week I updated the drivers for my GeForce card. Since then I`ve had no end of random resets and BSODs..
Then I noticed my gfx card was so hot, I couldn`t touch it for even a second. I checked the speed settings of the drivers and found the newer drivers had doubled the standard memory clock of the card
Still can`t believe the card survived being overclocked that much.

The FX was overclocked to the point of exploding, but even the GeForce4 has issues.  My dad has a tiny heatsink fan on his GF4 and it burns to the touch.  I myself had to put an Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer on my ATI 9800Pro, and not only did it drop my GPU temp 30 degrees, it reduced my Northbridge temp by 5.  Video cards are getting to be worse than CPUs when it comes to heat.

As for drivers, nVidia is in real trouble right now.  Their new drivers SUCK, and don't look as good as the ATI drivers.  I'm not surprised they've resort to shadow overclocking in an attempt to get their speeds up.

[Waccoon]

Hammer:  Which version?

56.72 WHQL.  He was getting about 4-5 BSOD a night with all his games.  I don't know what he's using now, but he told me they're about a year old, and his system is very stable, now, so he's sticking with them.

Ilwrath:  I'm not sure I like the FX series... I've stuck to my 4Ti. Less headaches.

My brother-in-law bought an FX retail (the cheap one with no fan), and he's had massive overheating problems since day one.  ATI cards are hot, too, but not THAT hot.

Ilwrath:  Might go to ATi next... But I've heard THOSE drivers are even worse than nVidia's, most of the time... and especially in Linux

News to me.  I've been using the 4.5 Catalyst drivers for a while and I haven't had any problems (the resetting problems I was having last month was because I shorted out my power supply when rewiring my case fans.  Oops).

[Waccoon]

Do you run any Linux stuff? What do you think of the Linux drivers?

Can't say.  I don't use Linux enough, so I gave the GeForce3 to my dad and now have a TNT2 and Celeron 400 in my Linux box.  I can't get *any* 3D graphics out of that thing, but my Linux system is for code, anyway.

I wouldn't even THINK of putting Linux and Windows on the same machine, so Linux gets the leftovers.  ;-)

As people have said, drivers can play an important factor in stability, and so can installing badly-written dodgy software (such as Realplayer, Quicktime, etc.) It frustrates me when I see peoples Windows desktops and I notice that they have about five hundred icons in their system tray from memory-resident programs that load on startup... and they are usually the ones that complain about speed and stability!

That's where all the stability complaints come from.  My Amiga didn't crash often, but it only had 2 background tasks (Magic Requester and StarClick).  MacOS 8 was a nightmare, since it had almost 200 system extensions, so tracking down a problem was a pest -- and that was just for the system, never mind 3rd-party extensions!  Comparitively speaking, Windows really isn't that bad in terms of reliability.  It's just the programming interfaces and registry that suck sewage.

Besides, if you own 95% of the market, you'll be a scapegoat for all badly written software, whether it's your fault or not.