Thargoid wrote:
And what does it being an Athlon matter in terms of the sound driver, that's not doing the sound. It will be something else on the motherboard coping with the audio surely?
Yep, but Athlon motherboards are not necessarily the same as Intel motherboards; given Micr0$haft's um,
apparent preference for Intel processors, it can make a difference.
IIRC, there were high-end machines with 1.1GHz chips on the market before XP came out.
But it might be because you're running XP Pro rather than the "home" version... I think there were things disabled (as in deliberately stopped by Microsoft rather than accidentaly nobbled by some innocent mistake) in Pro that work fine under the standard XP - to prevent people running games on 'work' machines. I've got XP SP2 with a RealTek AC'97 onboard and that is working fine...
And as for "upgrading" to SP3, why bother? It's
supposed to be just a collection of all the software updates since SP2, but with some "features" from Vista added. The most telling comment as to a good reason NOT to install it is that, when you read the 'documentation' on the Micr0$haft update tool, it warns you that it
should not make any
noticable changes to the way XP operates... sorry, but they put something like that in there - especially in light of the poor take-up of Vista (and the complaints by those who have bought it) and I wonder what "features" from Vista have been added. The only real "features" I know of that are substantially "better" than in XP (Micr0$haft's words - not mine!) relate to the hated security "improvements" and the fancy Aero 'rolladex' interface thing that is meant to replace ALT-TAB between applications. And since it hasn't added Aero to XP machines, there's not much else...
One of the more cynical theories is that there will be no problems for a while, then suddenly every machne running XP SP3 will start to suffer "inexplicable" slowness, and other problems - and people will suddenly decide to replace their XP machines with new Vista machines (if Vista is so good, how come machines with a much higher spec than "old" XP macihnes seem to be running slower???)
You really want to know what's gonna happen, Ambassador? Boom. Boom boom. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. BOOM!