[semi-serious]Should I ditch my XP install?

[Lord Orwell]

I use XP for day to day at work because I am not ready to migrate this system, and I will never do upgrades, only clean installs.

On my laptop though, I triple boot between XP, Vista, and 7, with 99% of its usage being on 7. XP was the biggest pain to install in this scenario because you have to do the F6 to load SATA drivers during install (which means I needed a USB floppy to hook up) then after windows is on, about 8 devices don't have drivers so I had to scour HPs site and around the web to get all the devices working. Vista and 7, install, no floppy needed, all drivers were either on the DVD or found on Windows Update. No fuss. Period.

So far I have had no issues, even though I am still running build 7000 (original public beta). There are lots of newer builds to be had on torrent sites, but I am not that desperate. MS will get me a new beta build when they are ready.

Are your raptors in a RAID0 config? That would certainly give you fast disk access, although it increases the chance of data loss.

according to my experience and some research, nearly every raid config you can set up nowadays, the chips are smart enough to stripe-read, no matter if it's raid 0, 1, or 10. I have a raid-10 and i get nearly 4x data read access even though it only writes at 2x. now THAT's fast.

So... um... interesting turn of events... I went digging into my case to install a new fan (was idling at 50 degrees C, now under fairly considerable load at 53 degrees... looks good so far), and I decided to rearrange the SATA plugs so the drives would read how I wanted them to in the BIOS... silly me. Wiped both Raptors, since neither read properly, and reinstalled 7. I really hope this isn't a bad move...

@klienma: no, the drives aren't striped. I thought about it, for the extra speed boost, but decided that the risk of data loss wasn't worth it. Besides, having them separate does have its' advantages. Dual-booting, for example. Or in this case, I'm going to have my larger apps installed to the second Raptor, so it should keep them running faster.

see above. I am thinking you might have wanted to keep xp in a small partition though. I've had issues getting sound in older programs in vista. You might not have that issue with creative, but ac97 i do.

Thus far, the only issue I've had is with AIM... even after uninstalling and reinstalling, it tries to load, then just closes... no errors or anything. Oh well... I hate it anyway, so what am I complaining about?

trillian?

I still need audio CD's because I haven't replaced the stereo in my car. I have the replacement unit in my back seat, which has a USB input... just don't have a harness for it. Once I get that, installing the thing will be easy.

i was going to buy one of those from best-buy. Saw it in the paper, went to buy it. It had been recalled. It was advertising it worked with jump drives. Turned out it only worked with jump drives. Every singe other memory stick was a fail. They got so many returns they quit carrying it.