Chuck,
How the HECK does MS allows a freakin' CD drive to suck up memory/resources
to the point nothing works ? I've seen this on other PC's too. WHAT a
bunch
of crap.
Remember how IBM used to demonstrate how formatting a diskette under Windows
would basically kill multi-tasking but the same thing under OS/2 had minimal
impact on the system? The real culprit there was Windows still used
"cooperative multitasking" (an oxymoron if you ask me...) where OS/2 used
preemptive multitasking. Cooperative multitasking did not work well unless
everything cooperated. So running Windows under OS/2 really did make a
"better Windows than Windows".
But I *thought* XP was supposed to be preemptive multitasking too. Yet it
seems some I/O tasks will bring the system to its knees. There seems to be
a considerable system wide delay when inserting a CD/DVD while it
initializes it and decides if/how autoplay should handle it. I suspect a
system task is running at high priority and holding a semiphore locked
during the process.
I am in the process of changing from a single core Pentium 4 to a quad core
Q6700 and yet there are still times XP doesn't multitask well. Oh how I
wish OS/2 would have survived the marketing war...
Doug
midrange.com
