Xion Community

I've been building PCs for years and as a result, loading them w/ an operating system. After Win 98, all us installers used millenium, really just being lazy, cause it found all you drivers for you. In the end nothing compared to Win XP Pro until I used Vista. Of course, I crashed the Vista comp no less than 20 times before I hit on the right combinations of modifications to the OS. All the direct x stuff you need is easy to install componenent by component, you cant use the direct x installers, they dont work. In the end you wind up with a comp that never crashes (I mean ever) and can run every program I've ever tried to run, out of thousands, with the exception of 2 or 3 games that were written like crap as it was. Yes, Vista out of the box sucks. But who could complain about a pc that runs all win programs, and never hangs?
have fun, xonenine

Apple doesn't want you to know this... they want people to think Vista will reformat your memory cards, eat your printer for breakfast, sell your first-born child to Satan, and give you 13 different STD's within five minutes of your first boot-up. Man I hate Apple.

Please tell me more specifically you've done to reach this degree of stability... my desktop still blue-screens every now and then, mostly on resource-heavy games and while using the Zune software. My laptop on the other hand, hasn't had any problems at all since I updated the wireless driver.

There are 2 dlls that need to be installed. As I said, they have to be downloaded and installed individually. d3drm.dll and dx8vb.dll. Also setup of Patin-Couffin and never use daemon tools, thats what always blue screened me. Clone CD, Virtual cd or several others are better, but keep in mind virtual drives seem to lead to most of the crashes, so I myself use CCD exclusively. There are several oyher things I've done, but as I often experiment, these are the concrete ones I can offer.

A reasonable user equals reasonable operating system stability.

I myself couldn't bring myself to try Vista, but if i ever had to, i'd go with a server version, because that is essentially much cleaner then the standard Vista Ultimate.

I also like to nLite windows installations, so they carry less useless crap.

xonenine Wrote:There are 2 dlls that need to be installed. As I said, they have to be downloaded and installed individually. d3drm.dll and dx8vb.dll. Also setup of Patin-Couffin and never use daemon tools, thats what always blue screened me. Clone CD, Virtual cd or several others are better, but keep in mind virtual drives seem to lead to most of the crashes, so I myself use CCD exclusively. There are several oyher things I've done, but as I often experiment, these are the concrete ones I can offer.

Daemon Tools... I had no idea that was screwing me over on stability. Sadly, EA games has released some grossly over-protected software lately, and even though I purchased a legal copy of BF2142, I had to rip and mount an image just to play it... pathetic. I'll try some other virtual drive software now, starting with Clone CD. I'm betting though that I have something else to blame for my blue screens with the Zune software.

I use sansa, and it really kicks butt, A 2 gig with a 4 gigmicro sd card, i think it can hold like 1500 songs. I'm not sure that I like that it creates a seperate folder for every artist, with subfolders of every album ,bu t it has album art, crazy sound quality, and is easy to navigate such a large playlist.
xonenine. On the average, I get about 2 or 3 programs a day to run on vista that aren't supposed to be able to run.The zune has video too,eh? does it hold alot? how is the movie quality?
have fun, xonenine

xonenine Wrote:I use sansa, and it really kicks butt, A 2 gig with a 4 gigmicro sd card, i think it can hold like 1500 songs. I'm not sure that I like that it creates a seperate folder for every artist, with subfolders of every album ,bu t it has album art, crazy sound quality, and is easy to navigate such a large playlist.
xonenine. On the average, I get about 2 or 3 programs a day to run on vista that aren't supposed to be able to run.The zune has video too,eh? does it hold alot? how is the movie quality?
have fun, xonenine

Not sure what the mp3 player stuff has to do with the thread, but okay...

I have a 80 GB Zune, and I've used up about 21 GB. On it, I currently have about 4500 songs*, five 50-minute videos ripped from DVD**, and a handful of pictures. I'm quite impressed by the video quality on it, though I haven't used any other portable players, so I have no basis for comparison. Unfortunately, Zunes cannot be viewed in Windows Explorer or used as portable storage (there is a registry hack to change this...). I found navigation to be much easier than that of the classic iPods (though my iPod experience is limited to time spent with display devices at electronics stores), and except for a couple of button combinations for uncommon tasks (such as hard restart and factory reset), everything is self explanatory. My Zune has only caused me a problem once in my year of ownership, and that was a lock-up caused by syncing with a computer that restarted to install a Windows update. I had to let the Zune's battery die before I could use it again.

* Most of my library (from CD) is 128kbps, the rest (from Zune Marketplace) is 192kbps
** Those videos are Xvid mp4's in 320x240 resolution, each is roughly 360 MB

hehe, I brought it up because I used an advanced playlist formatting device and screwed up all my playlists.Being intrigued by the idea of embedding art in my songs, I tried that method.No dice.Updating all my stuuf to ID3 tags seemed to screw things up too.I had no trouble with album art with the sansa, it was hands off and flawless w microsoft synch, but now I;m having trouble, probably because I learned there are so many options. Is it more stable to go w/ id2 tags?Will WMP tag and get album art for my playlists on the PC?
thanks, xonenine

ok heres a vista tidbit:many programs run perfectly after install with either the addition of a dll, the remove of a file after installation, or adding a string to a startup shortcut (like(-sli). If theres any program a vista user cant run, in like two years of patching I can count the total failures on one hand.If there are programs people think they have to have and won't run, they are welcome to ask if there's a fix, it's fun.
xonenine

Vista sucks, period.

Seven is going to be alot better with compatibility. And with more stability.

Also, people, learn this rule.

Never, and i mean, never, use a portable media player that NEEDS ITS OWN SOFTWARE TO RUN. You're effectively screwing yourselves over if you do.

Are us Vista users gonns get a big price break on 7?

logokas Wrote:Never, and i mean, never, use a portable media player that NEEDS ITS OWN SOFTWARE TO RUN. You're effectively screwing yourselves over if you do.

I find Zune's software to be quite likable, actually. Besides, after using the aforementioned registry edit, I don't see why you couldn't manage a Zune's library without the official software.

I have stopped burning images for a long time now, like 2 years.I go straight from Isobuster to files, which are then much easier to manipulate.