[Pierre-Marie Baty]

AAARGH

XP Home...

well yeah I quite agree that the thing they call XP Home is a smelly pile of shit.

XP Pro on the other hand is a worthy OS. Very stable. You don't even need the system restore feature. Just disable it and you'll save 200-300 Mb disk space.

Disable all the visual craps too... put your config into "max performance" instead of "best appearence" and you'll get the barebones Win98 look with no other crap to hog on your memory.

SF, what do your partitions look like ? Do you have several OSes installed on the same machine ? If not, just reformat them all into NTFS and eventually merge them together. If you can get something like 10Gb space in one partition, WinXP will make itself VERY comfortable. 5Gb is enough too for the system and an average range of programs.

You don't need Partition Magic to manage your partitions, you can do that too directly from inside Windows with the disk manager. I think it's in Control Panel -> Administration Tools but maybe they've moved it in XP Home. There are LOTS of difference between XP Home and XP Pro, they ripped out/simplified a lot of things for XP Home making it a n00bie/yo granma OS. But for the average user it's already a fcking pain in the ass.

You should be able to do networking with the same crossover cable too. The setup is just a bit different. Just remember to NEVER use the "networking wizard"!!! (never use ANY of the wizards anyway).

What is the soundcard you use anyway ?
I bet it's just a hardware setup problem. You may be outputting sound in 5.1 format or something or vice versa and the sound jack is not plugged into the right place, or the hardware mixer volume is incredibly low, or there's a buffer size to increase somewhere or something.