Under Development

Posted on 8 Jun 2009 at 15:34

 

Gallery

The Thomson has been replaced with a Humax PVR, which has so far behaved immaculately and recorded everything scheduled for the two weeks we were away. The only thing that died were three more inhabitants of Midsomer.

When I'm 64

In divorce number two, I declared my relationship with Windows XP 64 to be finally over. In October 2007 I built myself a high-powered machine to use at home, its main purpose being to run Cakewalk Sonar Studio 5. Its other job is to run the Superbike Challenge game.

Seeing as this computer had a dual-core 64-bit processor, it seemed sensible (well, it did at the time) to use Microsoft's super-duper 64-bit version of Windows XP to get the full benefit of the processor performance.

The reality turned out to be somewhat different from what I expected. It was fast all right - when it was running. The problem was that it would blow up with a blue-screen error at every touch and turn. Using it was akin to working with a first-generation personal computer such as a Sinclair ZX81. At least with one of those you could stop it crashing by keeping it cool with a carton of milk (see Under Development, Shopper 253), but the cause of this PC's crashes appeared to be completely random. It would fall over just sitting there, doing nothing at all. I'd frequently turn on the screen to see "The system has recovered from a serious error", which meant it had rebooted itself after a blue screen.

For a while I even pursued the option of sending the details of the crash to Microsoft, but after a couple of dozen times it became obvious that I wasn't going to get a personal call from Bill Gates apologising for the inconvenience and offering to help diagnose what was wrong. At one point, I resorted to a message containing language that might even have made Effing Jeff blush, but even that didn't elicit a response. Does anybody there ever read those incident reports?

As for Microsoft's online help, you could be lost in that maze for months, it's such a complex site.

Driver me mad

Even worse was the fact that very few of the devices I wanted to attach had 64-bit drivers. Some things just refused to run at all, including USB connections to some Yamaha equipment, while others had their performance throttled back by the old 32-bit drivers, which rather defeated the point. And I never succeeded in getting the DVD-RW drive to write to anything.

Anyway, Mrs R has bought me an upgrade to Cakewalk Sonar 8. It has lots of new digital instruments and effects, but I couldn't face the thought of trying to edit a recording and having to reboot every 10 minutes. I wiped the C: partition and installed the 32-bit version of Windows XP Professional Edition.

As when installing its 64-bit sibling, I had to go through the crazy rigmarole of attaching a floppy drive to load the SATA hard disk drivers, even though they were delivered on CD. But the effort was worth it. Mirabile dictu, it's been on for a whole week and hasn't fallen over once.

Author: David Robinson