Windows XP A*SE

[Squirrel]

Hi folks,

I'm having real probs with XP, and to be honest I'm not familiar with the O/S yet to be able to find workarounds, please bear with me as I have a few questions to try and sort this out, as I'm on the verge of putting 98se back on the box and jumping up and down on the XP CD.

1. When I initially upgraded to XP I noticed that the sound was appalling (crackly) I have an SB LIVE card and Microsoft Digital 80 USB speakers. I have got the latest drivers from Creative and after installing them I found that there was no difference to the sound quality, and also the utilities (such as the mixer) supplied under the SBLive upgrade, XP returns an error when you try to run them.

2. I also have a Creative WebCam Pro which is also USB, but when I finally installed the XP drivers for it, I get a popup screen saying the the Microsoft sound system uses 9% of the USB bandwidth and cannot be used in conjunction with the webcam (which uses 60% of the bandwidth). Do I need to buy A USB expansion card and put the webcam on that by itself?

3. My neice decided it would be fun to hit as many keys as possible on my laptop (which also has XP on it), whilst I was playing Alice (Great game EA!), and now when I maximize a program (pinball on XP for example) the whole screen turns black, and the playing area is restricted to the centre of the screen leaving a huge blank border around it.

4. Finally, this is for those who know the game Alice, when my dear Niece was pretending the play the piano on the laptop she also managed to bring upa huge blue 'mana egg timer' in the centre of the screen and I cannot work out how to get rid of it. Even uninstalled the game, deleted the directory and remove most of the registry keys associated to 'alice' but the timer still appears on the screen during gameplay ahhhhhhhhhhh.
Nothing in the instruction manual or on the EA website.

Sorry for all the questions but, I'm being driven mad by my PC's at the moment. :-)

Cheers

Squirrel.

[Tuqan]

1) I use 98se and have attempted to run xp on my machine and like you have been introduced to so many nightmares because of it that I went back to SE. I discovered, as you probably are now aware, that many OEM do not have drivers for XP but tell you that you can use their already poorly designed 2K drivers until a better one comes along. Well this is not always true. XP is not built on the same 2K platform and conflicts will occur with the use of these drivers over time and circumstance. Begin to run just the right combination of resource hungry software and Bingo!..welcome to the Twilight Zone. Make sure that the hardware is truly compatible to XP and not some 2K patch that may or may not be stable in all situations. Some manufacturers like AGFA Scanners are honest enough to tell you that on some of their products they are not presently compatible nor will their be in the future a XP driver available. This honesty of course caused me to go out and secure a scanner that was (CanoScan N670U by Canon) compatible. I never did get my Soundblaster to work...lucky you, at least yours crackles...mine just popped!

[Kurylo]

Yeah, I experience cracking in the systems like W2K or WXP. No such stuff at the 9x core. I'ts annoying, but I use WXP nevertheless. Because I like it.