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Who owes me a new computer?

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Seeking000:
I have this 'wonderful' Dell Dimension 4300 that came from the factory with Windows XP; and a shared IRQ with sound and graphics.  Needless to say; my computer cannot run music composition software (one of my primary uses for a computer).

For the most part, it manages the IRQ's pretty well (Microsoft claims superior IRQ sharing on XP over other systems - and that chnaging IRQ's is unecessary (despite the fact that you 'can't' change them in Win XP).

So I have three culprits with three different sides of the story:

1.) Music composition creation software companies (almost all of them use sound and graphics at extremely high IRQ access)
2.) Microsoft for making these false claims about Windows XP's ability to share IRQ's
3.) Dell, for placing sound and graphics on the same IRQ in Windows XP in the first place.

From the research I have conducted (being completely computer illiterate); trying to get to the bottom of this issue - I find for Microsoft and Dell.  It would either be a case of gross negligence or a greedy merger minimalizing how hard this would be to articulate for the average user that confronts this problem.  I have probably spent well over $400.00 in telephone bills and a hundred or so hours scouring the internet trying to decipher 'computer talk'.  I amazed I haven't completely destroyed my computer yet - a nod to both Microsoft and my penchant for having OCD and being overly cautious.

What are your opinions on the matter please?  I'm not a lawyer or anything, just an average person..

-Seeking000

badkarma:
when I tried out winxp I had the same problem, winxp incisted on hanging 6 devices on 1 irq. I could not find a way to manually re-assign the irq's and I just gave up and threw windows xp out the window. Use win2k, I don't think irq steering is as much as a problem there (but I don't run windows anymore so I wouldn't know   )

Calum:
morally, i would say it's the makers of the hardware that are mostly to blame. They make it a physical impossibility to do what you want to do. Next up, the makers of the system are partially to blame, maybe not much, maybe a lot depending on how you think about it, on one hand, Microsoft have only released a shit OS, so if you got a decent OS, you could use your hardware to its full potentiality (assuming your hardware was capable of things that the OS did not allow). On the other hand, your hardware is not up to snuff, and i bet that Dell would not have allowed this to be the case if not for Microsoft. After all, why waste money making hardware that has full functionality when the "only operating system that anybody uses" doesn't support half the features?
Microsoft dictates how crippled a particular generation of hardware is by releasing crippled operating systems.
Hardware vendors deserve a slap for making crippled hardware which matches the crippled OS perfectly.

And at the end of the day, the ambiguousness of the scenario means that legally, NOONE is to blame. You could fight it in court for the rest of your life and get nothing.

Read the licence agreement for your copy of windows xp, you will see that there is a clause there which allows Microsoft to actually change the contract in their favour even after you have agreed to the terms and it is then your responsibility to read the updates (which they don't notify you about) to find out your legal position. This clause itself has not been tested in the courts so there is a possibility that this retroactive clause itself is illegal (by virtue that it may violate your statutory rights).

You can bet that Dell will have as airtight a licence agreement (if perhaps slightly more orthadox, and maybe less totalitarian (though i wouldn't bet on it)) so good luck getting a new machine out of either of them...

Calum:

quote:Originally posted by BadKarma:
. Use win2k, I don't think irq steering is as much as a problem there
--- End quote ---

Don't bother, upgrade to mandrake linux 8.2 rather than downgrading to windows 2000.

GNU/Linux is free, so you haven't lost anything even if you do decide to go back to that familiar money eating hardware stomping virus trap you know as Microsoft windows.

You likely will not though, after a bit of settling in time, mandrake linux should be no trouble for anybody who has used winNT in my humble opinion...

edit: brain engaged, whilst there is music composition software for linux, it is perhaps not so intuitive or in many cases as advanced as the sort of thing you get for windows. You may wish to try out what is on offer however, also, you may wish to use an emulator to run your existing windows programs in linux, such as 'wine', wineX' or 'VMWare'.
It is largely accepted that these emulators actually run the programs more stably than if they ran in their native windows, since the linux system is much more stable underneath. Also, if you can resolve this irq thing in linux, then you should have no bother with your irqs when using a windows emulator.
I must say though, i haven't tried running windows apps in linux myself, but i just thought i should add all that since you were originally saying you needed to run music composition software.

[ June 05, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]

Seeking000:
Thank you for the quick and helpful responses.
Another interesting tidbit...
The soundcard 'upgrade' offered by Dell is the Santa Cruz Turtle Beach card.  What's interesting is that this is the only sound card that has been certified by Microsoft to be compatable with XP - (some digital / wave thing I don't fully comprehend).  The irony?

Whenever I use the native OS's synth and open any music composition program .. that program will crash with any sound activity and restart the computer, at which point the computer will crash continuously unless I disable Microsofts native win XP synthesiser from interacting with the _only_ sound card approved for that OS!

Is that crazy or what?

-Seeking000

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