Sorry took me so long...but at least I spared you a bunch of "would've been censored" ranting and raving. I was sure the idea was hogwash indeed, but wanted to hear it confirmed as I was starting to hear otherwise. Still having all kinds of stupid transient problems with this new (been over a year now) machine. This time they changed out the graphics card (FX 1700 w/ 512mb) to not much avail...now all that's left is the motherboard?
So, got this thing back late Friday...besides the vid card, supposed to have had both HD's clean wiped, windows reloaded, and all tweaked up with latest drivers (and all the crap cleaned out) so I didn't have to do it...with assurances it was doing great (I took SU down to the shop this time and indeed it was snapping 3D like a champ) and had a pcpitstop score of 4810 w/ 3d graphics in the 0 %-tile (whatever that means).
Since then (besides deleting and defraging the D-drive they didn't touch) I've had to install IE7 (it had IE6 and an IE7 Beta toolkit...?), WMPlayer 11 (it had ver9...this load from my harddrive took over 20min?), and uninstall several sophomoric web-based office and graphics programs I'd never seen before (all of them phoning home from startup and elsewhere deep in the "you can't find me" bowels of XP). Since this didn't really fix it, I started in shutting down or disabling as many of the update and other comm links the programs I wanted to keep had open...now I was better.
After finally taking the chance to uninstall Nero (thank god xp can at least use the Asus to read a cd) I am now in pretty good shape. I tried getting rid of Realtek, because I thought maybe one of it's drivers was in conflict with something of Nvidia's causing the remaining sound issues (since the "let's just see" ATI swap card didn't have the sound issues), but xp couldn't take over for the intel motherboard's onboard sound...? BTW: no security software - just xp's firewall.
So now here is where I stand: sometimes I get choppy sound playing a clip in WMP, sometimes on line, and sometimes just with the rebooting wave; IE is very slow to load (BIG processor user) and stays slow until I shut it down and then start again...this is better if I wait 10-15 min after turning on the computer before trying anything (SU does this too); I'm getting a lot of "done, but with errors" notes at the bottom left of IE...status bar?
But...sometimes MSNBC loads so fast I can't believe it. SU almost always responds wonderfully without wireframing on orbit, beachball inferencing, or hopscotch scrolling in or out 8~)) Exports are faster too and PSP doesn't wait for fancy filters to work near as long. So I guess if I have to wait for this machine to warn-up it's worth it...but I'd rather not:
This wait period doesn't show any processor activity in task manager, but I'd swear the machine is doing something else...at least that's how it acts (or bathroom break?). I have the processes running down to as low as I've seen:[image: zkqs_tn_taskmanager.jpg]
So when I get up some guts again I'm gonna have a go at the windows processes...any help or suggestions are begged for and will be fawned over, thank you very, very, much!
