The Computer Blog

Wednesday, April 30, 2003

Finally

I completed my XP reload yesterday. I only had a couple of problems. My "500 Nations" multimedia CD would hang on the Microsoft logo screen. I could get my Firewire hard drive to mount, but I was unable to repartition and reformat the drive using both XP's tools and those in Partition Magic. I kept getting various error messages. To workaround that, I booted into Windows 98SE, installed Partition Magic, and tried deleting, re-creating, and formatting the Firewire drive's partition from Win98. Worked like a charm! I reformatted the Firewire drive using Partition Magic's FAT32 format and then copied my data drive to it. That was one more vote for moving back to Windows 98SE.

So, why don't I? Well, XP is more stable and handles fonts on an LCD and multitasks better. And it's a better system to edit video on. But it wouldn't take much at this point to convince me that those advantages are outweighed by 98's workhorse ethic. I'm going to do nearly all my video editing on my Macs anyway. That's why I bought them.

While I really like Partition Magic, I may have bought my last version of it. One of my pet peeves has become computer companies that treat customers like criminals or that act like I need to be grateful to them for their product. When I was having problems getting Partition Magic to work for me under XP, I decided to look for an upgrade and see if that might help. There was one, but the website wouldn't let me download it without registering my product. I didn't want to register. Instead, I sent an e-mail to PowerQuest telling them they had alienated a customer. Then, I came back and booted under Win98SE and got everything to work without it. I'm a firm believer in voting with my pocketbook and my feet.

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