BlueOval

I play WoW - primarily horde on Argent Dawn (US). [edit to add]I have vent and a mic too.[/edit]

Whew! As usual I've come away from a conversation with you more educated than before. Thanks.

I don't think games look any better in Vista than in XP. However my experience is limited due to the fact I have a 7900 card running on my Vista laptop and an 8800GTS card on my XP desktop. Not to mention the fact that I've yet to try a game coded for DX10. As far as games running the same in both OS'es that is true to an extent. Once you try to apply patches changing the original folder's contents, Vista will not allow you to unless you have created a seperate directory for your games other than Program Files. I created one called Games Files and installed all my games to that directory and had no problems; but prior to my finding out about Vista's hidden folders and the fact the the Program Files dir that you see is just a virtual copy of the actual files, I had all sorts of problems whenever a new game patch came out.

umm.. Not to dispute you Angry, but there were a couple of versions of Windows out before Win95. If you wanted to run an IBM-compatible as opposed to a Mac you ran Windows, it was that simple. So why Win95 'started the Windows revolution' any more than preceding versions did I'm not sure. Do you say that because it sold in record numbers for the time? Did it outsell any previous version? I'm willing to concede that it may have be an OK OS and that I'm looking at it negatively in hindsight; but I don't believe that it was so good that it sold the general public on the idea of having Windows as their OS of choice as opposed to buying a Mac instead. You are the only person I have ever heard say that WinME was a pretty good OS. Every other person I have ever heard - be it online, in print or in person - has said that WinME was a piece of crap - in fact they said it was the worst OS MS had yet come out with. Now I never had WinME, so I'm not saying this from personal experience and I'm not saying I wasn't a noob back then, but I had been tinkering with PCs for about 10 years when ME came out. One other thing I'd like to comment on is Now who is using hindsight? I remember when they first came out with 65MB HDDs and everyone thought they were HUGE; having 16MB of RAM made your rig killer or having a Voodoo card was the shiznit as a gamer. Yes, we had almost nothing compared to what we have today; but for back then everything we did have was hardware to drool over just like today. Now I know you're going to rip me a new one over this post, lol, and I know I'm not the techhead that you are and probably never will be; but I call 'em as I see 'em and that's how I view it. Getting back to Vista I wholeheartedly agree with you.

Not to change the subject, but I wholeheartedly agree with the above statement and would go further by saying that that is the #1 thing that is wrong with our country today - from the Clintons on down to your average Joe in the street. Bed-wetters!

Well let's see.. I recall WindowsME being a colossal flop and Windows95 was pretty much a pile of s*it.. Altho I recall working with WFWG 3.11, I can't recall what was thought of it at the time. I don't remember having any personal issues with it.. MS-DOS wasn't the only version of DOS back in the day and it wasn't the best version, but it was the version that sold the most. I wonder what ever happened to the other makers of DOS programs..

Ok, well I cleared CMOS for 10 minutes tonite and removed all of the power connectors from the board. Upon turning it back on it went through the POST and had a checksum error. It provided a box of options that I could choose from to boot - had to use the up/down arrows. I was using the keyboard I brought to his house which is a USB board, but we had it hooked up to PS2 via an adapter. Lights on the board lit up which seemed to indicate that the board was being recognized, but the rig would take no input from it. Then we got to the Boot from CD, press any key thing again and man, I was tappin' on them keys! LOL But, alas, no joy. =( Could there be a problem with the I/O ports? I'm pretty much at a loss here. I don't want to tell him he has to go out and buy a PS2 board just to load Windows... Btw, the guy who formatted the drive wasn't in tonite; but I'll be sure to ask him what he used to format with when I return to work on Tuesday.

I really couldn't say as I was snoozing on the couch as the format was taking place. (I get up at 4:30 AM to go to work every day. All of this happened on Friday night - by the time we got around to formatting it was close to midnight.) The HDD is a Seagate model, so I'll check their website. Thanks again wev. Wow, really?!?! LOL Well, I stayed awake long enough at the other guy's place to know that the drive wasn't being recognized in his rig until he set a jumper on the back of it to the other 2 pins which we both assumed was the master/slave jumper. There's a jumper with 4 pins on the back of the drive. After we switched the jumper, the system recognized the drive. If it's not a master/slave setting, I don't know what it is. It's this particular Seagate model which is a 500GB SATAII drive w/32MBs of cache. Excellent info re XP and NTFS. Yes, that is exactly what we did. At the point of clearing CMOS and rebooting was when I drove the rig home and posted here, so no, I've not been back in the BIOS to this point. Staying up all night like that on Friday (didn't get home till 2:30 AM) threw my body clock out of whack and I just got up. :

@ nghisus: Yes, the HDD is SATA - the newer 3GB/s transfer rate version. @ wevsspot: Thank you. This is exactly the kind of answer I was hoping to get here. I had cleared CMOS and rebooted a couple of times to try and get into the BIOS, but kept running into the keyboard problem. After clearing CMOS and rebooting I tried loading optimized defaults and also fail-safe defaults with no success, but I did not wait 10 minutes for CMOS to clear nor did I remove all power connectors. I later found that the friend who wiped his drive has a wireless keyboard which would have presented a new problem rather than fix the current one. I did not know to wait 10 minutes while clearing CMOS - the most I've ever waited was 1 minute. I also didn't know to disconnect all the power connectors from the board. The upgrade disc he's using appears to be genuine - has the pinkish coating on it just like my full version disc and came in a genuine MS box with little booklets that sing the praises of XP. But he didn't get it from me, so I can't vouch for its authenticity. @ speedeuphoria: I have memtest on a bootable cd along with a few other programs I've come to trust that I like to include in a fresh OS install. I did not think to include a HDD error checker, but will look for one online. Thanks for all your help.

Yes, first we could and then we couldn't when we got to the part about putting in the full version disc since we were at his house and all he had was the upgrade disc. I have a good keyboard and a full version disc. He does not. My house is 55 miles away from his. I have yet to go back. I stated in my original post that I was going to attach my keyboard to his rig, but that I wanted input here first in case there was something I was overlooking or did not know. Direct quote from my original post "..and now it says that NTLDR is missing. There also seems to be a problem with his keyboard not being recognized." Prior to that I stated that he had used an upgrade disc to install Windows; near the end I stated that we had tried using full version discs without success. I fail to see how that created confusion in what I was asking; however I will endeavor to be more clear in future posts. Thanks for all of your wonderful help.

Yes, BUT.. it doesn't recognize the keyboard! It's impossible for me to hit F1 or Del, etc. I guess you just scanned the original post too.. lol Ok, so by using any full version of Windows I can get past the point of it asking for verification and with a working keyboard I can get it to boot. I got it. Now as far as the NTLDR missing am I correct to assume that the upgrade disc will fix this problem as well?

So you're saying I could use a 98 disc to verify that I'm an owner of Windows in order to get into the BIOS? But what happens when I want to continue loading the OS? Then I will need an XP disc, yes? Since I'm not advising him to install 98... Or are you saying that I can switch back to the upgrade disc at that point?! Except we're unable to get to that point until we can get the keyboard recognized.. I think the one he got from our other friend just died on us. lol The thing looks ancient.

umm.. Did you read the whole thing or did you quickly scan it? I can't get into the BIOS. If I could, I wouldn't have this problem. The rig gets past the POST and then refuses to boot. The guy tried to load XP via an upgrade disc. This is a brand new rig with nothing previously on the HDD. I think the problem is the keyboard and, yes, it's a USB; but we also connected it via PS2 with no joy. I'll be connecting my extra keyboard to it tomorrow and giving it a shot with my XP disc. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to 'fix' it simply by having a full version of Windows and a working keyboard.

I put together a list of stuff for a friend who wanted to build his own for basic email and web surfing with the ability to play an occasional game and lot's of storage space for his music and movies. He wanted to keep costs around $1000. The following is what he got: CM Centurion 5 Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L eVGA 8600GTS Superclocked 256MB Antec TP3-550 Intel E6750 Mushkin 2x1GB DDR2 800 Seagate Barracuda 500GB There's a DVD Burner in there too along with a Viewsonic 19" monitor. I forget which ones he got. So last night I supervised while he put everything together and we booted it up and it posted fine. We go into the BIOS and change the boot order and I go to the kitchen to get a beer. This is where things turned ugly. I told him to buy an OEM copy of XP - he decided to get a copy from another friend of ours - something he neglected to tell me. He puts the OS disc in the drive and we get as far as formatting and creating partitions. Then it asks him to place an SP2 disc in the drive to prove he has access to Windows. I ask wtf and he says he has no clue. I look at the Windows box and the copy of XP he got was an upgrade version. So we took his hard drive out and took it to another friend who lives nearby and he plugged it into his rig so that he could format the drive clean. We take it back to his place and put it back in, making sure that it was set back to master, and now it says that NTLDR is missing. There also seems to be a problem with his keyboard not being recognized (another gift from the friend who gave him the upgrade copy of XP). We've tried using 2 known good full versions of XP to boot with, but no joy. By that time it was too late to go back to the guy who formatted his drive for him, so I took his rig back to my house in an attempt to figure out what the problem is. I have an extra keyboard that I was going to give him anyway - it's less than 6 months old. I've yet to attach it and try again. Wanted some input from you guys as to what the problem might be or what I can try.

Is there a list of mods for the site or a list of who's online anywhere..?