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Aztec Driver

Aztec Driver

Line Up and Wait
Joined
Mar 7, 2005
Messages
982
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Elizabethtown, PA
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Display name:
Bryon
Pressing on from my past computer problems, I have since decided to do some further "upgrades" to my computer. I have already purchased a laptop with the new Windows 7, and, although I hated it to start with, there are some advantages.
So, since my desktop unit has been bogging down more and more, and none of the antivirus, spyware, etc. programs find anything, and removing everything from resident memory did not really help, I backed up my important files, bought a new bigger hard drive, and Windows 7 operating system. Reasonably priced upgrade, or so I thought.
Popped the unit open and installed the new drive, and installed Windows 7 onto the new drive. Man, that was fast and easy. I never had an operating system install so easy and fast. Hmmmm. Seems not to have such good graphics anymore. Hmmm. Seems my video card driver is out of date and not supported by Windows 7. OK, just get new driver. Drat, they no longer support it.
So now I have Windows 7 with several flaws because of old technology. I have installed XP on other HDD's, but would really like to have the choice to boot either Windows 7 or XP. Unfortunately, it seems Windows 7 Virtual PC also requires hardware that my system does not have.

Anyone have any good suggestions, or should I just go back to XP?

Anyone want to purchase a Windows 7 operating system?:D
 
Welcome to the Forced Upgrade scenario. I believe this is done on purpose.....

-Skip
 
All Windows OS upgrades have been the same... all the way back to 3.1.

You can probably wait it out because someone will likely develop a driver for your video card (been there, done that) or accept XP for another year.

As mentioned above, the path of least resistance is probably to pony up for a new video card but that might not be the end of it. Seems like every new version of Windows expects more and more of your hardware - building for the future and not for the past.

I gave up "bleeding edge" technology years ago, but now the computer manufacturers force us into the new operating systems by not offering the likes of XP any more. My reality is to build my computers from the ground-up, and keep a stack of OEM Windows XP Pro CD's around at all times.
 
jimbtv said:
All Windows OS upgrades have been the same... all the way back to 3.1.

You can probably wait it out because someone will likely develop a driver for your video card (been there, done that) or accept XP for another year.

As mentioned above, the path of least resistance is probably to pony up for a new video card but that might not be the end of it. Seems like every new version of Windows expects more and more of your hardware - building for the future and not for the past.

I gave up "bleeding edge" technology years ago, but now the computer manufacturers force us into the new operating systems by not offering the likes of XP any more. My reality is to build my computers from the ground-up, and keep a stack of OEM Windows XP Pro CD's around at all times.
Click to expand...

Well...yeah... why build for the past? We expect our equipment to do more and more every year, run more and more complex software and have better and better resolution. We've come a long way from the TRS-80 and the Commodore 64. You wouldn't expect to be able to use the graphics card out of your C-64 which ran Flight Sim just fine to be able to run FS-X. This is one of the reasons that outside of memory and failed hard drives, I don't upgrade computers, I just get a new one, they last me about 2 years, and I'm good with that because that's pretty much when the latest technology machine is starting to get superseded. Plus, these days machines are dirt cheap. In Dec I bought the hottest 17" Sony Vaio, Core i7, 6G ram, 500gb drive, Blu Ray, 1080p HD.... for under $1200.... That's less than half of what our TRS-80 with 4K ram and a tape deck cost. I have a little Aspire One as well that I bought for $250, That's twice what my dad paid for his first electronic 5 function calculator.

Keeping copies of XP around to run on multi core 64 bit machines is like saying "Yeah, I bought a new Corvette, but I got rid of the EFI and put a Quadrajet on it."
 
You should be able to select the boot device (Drive C:Win7, Drive D:Win/XP, E:DVD, network). You have to get into the BIOS which is usually done from a power on and hitting PF2.
 
I'm sick of the seemingly-unfixable performance decay in Win machines. The system just gets loaded up with crap, crap starts interfering with other crap, all sorts of problems result. I've tried CrapCleaner, SystemMechanic, all sorts of stuff.

Next PC will be a Mac. And not just because the iPimp keeps pushing Apple products on me (yes, you Kent!).
 
I use Ubuntu Linux as the main operating system and have XP installed parallel, for the few programs which are only available for Windows. In my case this is just the MS flight simulator and the video editing software Sony Vegas.

Ubuntu comes with everything one needs for his daily work, it is free and it even automatically updates the programs which are installed.
 
German guy said:
Ubuntu comes with everything one needs for his daily work, it is free and it even automatically updates the programs which are installed.
Click to expand...

I recently put Ubuntu on a server. After lack of ability for my cohorts to pick up on the command line interface (young punks that don't remember the old DOS days), I put a GUI on it. Can't remember which one, though.

I was really impressed with the performance and ease of use - even on a server setup. So much so that I'm considering wiping my wife's Vista laptop and putting Ubuntu on it - all she does is Word, Powerpoint, and web which should work well on a Linux machine. And with the GUI, she'll never really know the difference.
 
silver-eagle said:
You should be able to select the boot device (Drive C:Win7, Drive D:Win/XP, E:DVD, network). You have to get into the BIOS which is usually done from a power on and hitting PF2.
Click to expand...
Most BIOSes aren't going to support booting multiple operating systems on the same hard drive. That's really not their job. That is the job of the boot loader.
 
flyersfan31 said:
I'm sick of the seemingly-unfixable performance decay in Win machines. The system just gets loaded up with crap, crap starts interfering with other crap, all sorts of problems result.
Click to expand...

Part of this is the Bloated OS.. but a significant part of this is poorly written apps that leak memory and hog resources.

If you took a windows box, running a SINGLE or few well written apps without all the bloatware in the bottom tray... and left it alone it could run weeks without needing a reboot. Not quite as good as a Mac, but still great.

Its all the crapware provided for it by other software vendors that cause many of the problems and bog it down.
 
flyersfan31 said:
I'm sick of the seemingly-unfixable performance decay in Win machines. The system just gets loaded up with crap, crap starts interfering with other crap, all sorts of problems result. I've tried CrapCleaner, SystemMechanic, all sorts of stuff.

Next PC will be a Mac. And not just because the iPimp keeps pushing Apple products on me (yes, you Kent!).
Click to expand...
You'll be happy to know that my Macbook Pro is bogging down, too, so I'm upgrading the OS and hard drive at the same time. (I'm two versions of OS X back. I've added a lot of stuff that may have left remnants going way back to a PPC iMac so I want a clean start and Snow Leopard fixes some internet problems.) It's nowhere near the morass that is a PC upgrade.

I probably need more than max 2GB RAM I have so I'll likely get a new iMac next year.

BTW, it's going on 6 years old and other than 2 batteries and an iffy keyboard has never died. :fcross:
 
jesse said:
Most BIOSes aren't going to support booting multiple operating systems on the same hard drive. That's really not their job. That is the job of the boot loader.
Click to expand...
He did say he loaded Win 7 on the new drive and left XP on the other. That the bios can handle.
 
Doggtyred said:
Part of this is the Bloated OS.. but a significant part of this is poorly written apps that leak memory and hog resources.

If you took a windows box, running a SINGLE or few well written apps without all the bloatware in the bottom tray... and left it alone it could run weeks without needing a reboot. Not quite as good as a Mac, but still great.

Its all the crapware provided for it by other software vendors that cause many of the problems and bog it down.
Click to expand...

I've got a W2K box running a couple of applications (one is a VNC app) that runs multiple weeks at a time without rebooting. I've BSOD'd a couple of XP machines. And I've managed to lock up various services on a BSD unix box a couple of times.... but the Unix boxes tend to run longer without rebooting than even my router does.

None of the systems are perfect...
 
silver-eagle said:
He did say he loaded Win 7 on the new drive and left XP on the other. That the bios can handle.
Click to expand...
My mistake - I misread your post as all being C: .. didn't notice the drive letters changing in your description. I tend to read fast and sometimes it bites me.
 
mikea said:
You'll be happy to know that my Macbook Pro is bogging down, too, so I'm upgrading the OS and hard drive at the same time. (I'm two versions of OS X back. I've added a lot of stuff that may have left remnants going way back to a PPC iMac so I want a clean start and Snow Leopard fixes some internet problems.) It's nowhere near the morass that is a PC upgrade.

I probably need more than max 2GB RAM I have so I'll likely get a new iMac next year.

BTW, it's going on 6 years old and other than 2 batteries and an iffy keyboard has never died. :fcross:
Click to expand...
I just read that the key features of Snow Leopard that use the 64 bit multiprocessor won't work on an Intel Core Duo Mac. *sigh* I might as be running Windows.

I'm upgrading anyway.
 
flyersfan31 said:
Next PC will be a Mac. And not just because the iPimp keeps pushing Apple products on me (yes, you Kent!).
Click to expand...

I know it wasn't me, because you announced that you were going to buy an iMac before I even had to try to sell you one. :yes:

I think you've probably seen that your iPhone is a really neat piece of technology and works well, so you are more interested in seeing what the Kool-Aid tastes like on this side of the computer world. :D It's called the "halo effect" and it's been going on since the iPod started working with Windows - People get one of the other Apple devices (iPod, iPhone, iPad) and like it so much they give the computers a try as well. Some ridiculously high percentage of people who buy a Mac in an Apple retail store have never owned a Mac before in their life (and I know you are not one of those :P)

Watch out - After you've got the mobile device and the Mac, you'll notice that their stock is quite user-friendly as well. :D I wish I would have had the money to dump into some Apple stock in about 1997! My brother's best friend, another Mac geek, used to always ask for Apple stock for Christmas and his birthday and collected a few shares at a time that way. A couple of years ago he sold it all - And used the proceeds to buy a brand-new condo for cash at age 25 or so. :blush: Interestingly enough, my Apple stock has grown by more than the purchase price of all of the Apple gadgets I've bought since I bought the stock.
 
As for the XP system on the old drive, if you've ruled out malware and you've cleaned up the garbage and cleaned the registry using CCleaner or some other decent tool, but the machine still dawdles, a lot of times the problem can be filesystem corruption (easily solved with a CHKDSK /f ), Master File Table fragmentation (not so easily solved unless you have a bootable utility to fix it, like paragon), pagefile fragmentation, or registry fragmentation (the latter two of which can be fixed with something called PageDefrag).

The MFT ideally should have two "fragments," itself and a backup of itself. So if you run the "analyze" function under Defrag and it shows two MFT fragments, that's actually perfect. In fact, anything less than four or five fragments I usually leave alone unless file access is still very sluggish after everything else has been fixed. Defragging the MFT is time-consuming and a bit risky, and usually the performance hit isn't significant until it gets more fragged than that. But sometimes it is, and defragging the MFT can do wonders.

There are plenty of third-party multiple bootloaders out there, like Acronis OS Selector, or there are multiple hard drive selectors that go between the motherboard and the hard drives and allow you to flip a switch to select the one you want to boot from.

If your motherboard, processor and RAM are sufficient to keep Win7 happy for a while, I suggest you splurge on a video card, examine and clean up the XP drive as above, and create a dual-boot system using either a third-party bootloader or a hard drive selector.

-Rich
 
German guy said:
Ubuntu comes with everything one needs for his daily work, it is free and it even automatically updates the programs which are installed.
Click to expand...

I put Ubuntu an on old, slow laptop just to get my feet wet with it. I like it quite a bit, especially the free part :) I especially like that the office applications (word proc, spreadsheet) are MS compatible. If I get another laptop (probably slightly used), I think i'll either dual boot with Ubuntu or just wipe the drive and put Ubuntu on there.
 
OK, I didn't necessarily follow people's recommendations, but I am back to operational status, at least so far.

Windows 7 didn't like several things about my system, so rather than spend a lot more money and run into more possible problems, I wiped the new drive again and re-installed Windows XP. I am slowly loading my programs again, and so far, it's working like it used to. I am not into "keeping up" with the new technology anymore.

It cost too much, you never get your money's worth, it is obsolete by the time you get it, and it is rarely all it is cracked up to be.

Thanks for the discussion anyway.

(anyone need a good full Windows 7 version :D)
 
Doggtyred said:
Part of this is the Bloated OS.. but a significant part of this is poorly written apps that leak memory and hog resources.

If you took a windows box, running a SINGLE or few well written apps without all the bloatware in the bottom tray... and left it alone it could run weeks without needing a reboot. Not quite as good as a Mac, but still great.

Its all the crapware provided for it by other software vendors that cause many of the problems and bog it down.
Click to expand...

yep good point. Seems the os should have been written to prevent that though. Especially to limit all the .dlls that seem to linger like skunk spray.
 
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