As a computer shop owner in the Houston area, I see this kind of stuff everyday. XP works beautiful on allot of different apps and hardware, but pukes real bad on others. certain things happen, when you add certain programs, for instance b4 Roxio came out with their latest version of ezcd creator, (yuck) when you installed it on xp it would change up the cdrom driver to what they thought would be better than the ms' version, consequently the driver would fail, and an xp restore or cdrom.sys file replacement was needed just to see the cdrom drives again. since, they have revised the program so that it truely works with the msxp driver. and that is on the generic systems. Companies like Compuke, Dell,Gateway and HPos, create their own, or have 3rd party programmers create drivers that work with their particular hardware/os config. so wiping the system usually leads to problems. Eg. gateway has their own custom made Radeon VE video card, so getting driver from ATI won't work very well with the card..same with some modems, so it's off to gateway.com you go. On a side note, I have been doing this since the late 80's, and afaik, I am the only one around that has a complete AMD/XP system on WinXP running in my car! (see it at Fordfestiva.com )
DJ

 

Which store do you run?

 

I own Gulfnet Computer Services.. I don't run a storefront any more, too much overhead plus you have to keep inventory (yuck), I only have 3 employees.. mostly onsite service, and mostly small businesses, but my last store was on Ahrens in SOHO. I work from my house now, very few people drop systems off, but when they do, it's because my company was reccomended by another company.
Dj

 

the only time i need to reboot my server (running XP pro) is when i have a damn power outtage! but other than that i have never had to reboot it.. its been on for 3 months at 1 time