Windows XP

Is there still a shortage of 64-bit drivers?

When it comes to technology, I’m almost always an early adopter. When you adopt a technology before it becomes mainstream, you expect to have to deal with some quirks, and you expect to pay premium price for that technology. As the technology matures though, you expect the quirks to go away, and for the price of the technology to drop.

With that in mind, I had a situation this week that I just have to vent about. In November of 2006 I was out of the country for an extended period of time. I had some articles that were going to be due while I was gone, and I knew that I was going to have to be able to write them while I was abroad. I also knew that I was going to have to run server software on my laptop so that I could experiment with the techniques that I was going to be writing about. I ended up buying the biggest, baddest, most powerful laptop that I could find.

My laptop of choice was an HP. I forget the exact model number, but it was in the Pavilon DV8000 line. HP considered this particular laptop to be a Windows Media center laptop. It had a 17” screen, a gig of RAM, and a 64-bit CPU, all of which were considered high end features at the time.

Even though the laptop had 64-bit hardware, I needed to run Virtual PC, and that required a 32-bit version of Windows (remember, this was two and a half years ago). Needless to say, I never bothered to install a 64-bit version of Windows.

Well, a lot of time has passed, and I have bought a couple more laptops since then. Even so, the laptop that I just described was far from being obsolete, so I gave it to my wife to use. I knew that she wouldn’t know what to do with most of the stuff that I had installed, so I blanked the hard drive and installed the 64-bit version of Windows XP.

Windows installed just fine, but I had a couple of rude surprises once I was done. First, I found out that even though the laptop has the Designed for Windows XP sticker on it, HP does not offer many 64-bit drivers for Windows XP. Windows provided some of the drivers, but so far I have yet to be able to locate a functional sound card driver.

I also discovered that Microsoft never made a 64-bit version of SP3 for Windows XP. I’m sure that this is common knowledge, but I stopped using Windows XP a year ago, so this little detail had slipped by me. The only reason I was installing Windows XP on the laptop was because my wife asked me to.

To make a long story short, I just can’t believe that even after two and a half years that there is a shortage of 64-bit Windows XP drivers for some hardware. 64-bit operating systems are the norm today, and a large percentage of people still use Windows XP. Asking for 64-bit drivers for Windows XP doesn’t seem like such an unreasonable request.

I have spent quite a few hours looking for drivers and attempting various work arounds that I have been reading about on the Internet, with no luck. It looks like I am going to have to format the hard drive and install a 32-bit OS.

Windows XP Compatibility for Windows 7

Yesterday I was reading everyone’s opinions of Windows 7 on various technology related blogs. Some of the blogs predict that Windows 7 is going to be the final nail in the coffin for Microsoft. Other blogs predict that Windows 7 is going to be the best selling operating system of all times.

I thought about writing about the reasoning behind these speculations in yesterday’s blog post, but ultimately I decided not to. I’m really glad that I waited, because today something was announced that could change everything. Windows 7 is going to come with a Windows XP compatibility mode that is based on virtualization technology. This new feature hasn’t made it into any of the betas yet, but it will be included in the RC build that is scheduled for public release on May 5^th. Right now there aren’t a lot of details available regarding this feature, but I will definitely write more about it as details become available.

Vista and malicious software

Although most people seem to think of Vista as being one of the worst mistakes that Microsoft has ever made, I have never made a secret of the fact that I prefer Vista over XP. My main reason for this is that Vista is a lot less suseptible to malware infections than XP is. I have lost count of the number of times that I have had to manually disinfect a particularly nasty malware infection on a Windows XP machine for friends, family, and clients. I’m not going to say that Vista is immune to malware infections, but to date, nobody has ever asked me to help them to disinfect their Vista machine. I know that the nay sayers will probably say that this is because more people run XP than Vista, but there is finally some hard data to back up what I have been saying all along.

The article at: http://blogs.pcmag.com/securitywatch/2009/04/malware_on_vista_rare_accordin.php shows the number of infections per 1000 machines that are running various operating systems. The rate of infection is far lower for Vista than it is for XP.