my personal experience is with RedHat(which only makes enterprise versions now), debian and mandrake.

Ok. I have put XP and yet have some questions. Well, just two for now: when my com is inactive for a few minutes, OS start a rampage on HDD. It immediately stops when I start to do something so there are no performance losses but it shortens the life of HDD. As far as I know, I cleaned the startup section. What I need to turn off to stop that?

The second problem is that when I put some CD in, OS open it as a dir or autorun it. How to turn this off?

1. This is probably indexing of the harddrive. It 'should' eventually stop, after the HD contents are catalogued. To turn it off:

go to services (easiest is start | run | type 'services.msc')
find indexing services
set it to manual or disabled

2. Autorun. To disable/tweak autorun

open my computer
choose your cd-rom drive(s)
right click and go to properties
go to the autoplay tab and make your selections

lemme know if there's anything else.

Lol. Satis' experience rocks!

Indexing service was set to manual. Something other?

hmm, if it's not the indexing service, it might be the autorestore service. Right click on my computer, go to properties, go to the system restore tab, and check the 'turn off system restore' button. It may be a good idea to reboot afterwards.

If it's still grinding, I'm not sure. You may want to check task manager (just leave it open) and sort by cpu usage. It might give us a better idea.

So just to skip to the second step because sys restore is one of the first things I turn off.

What about autorun? Win overrides my choice.

even after you specify your choice in the drive properties? That's lame. I'd recommend turning the stupid thing off and doing it manually, but that's just me. I hate autorun. It does the wrong thing 90% of the time. Sorry, but i'm running out of ideas now. You're so hard to please.

As far as the grindage...do you have MS office installed? There's an indexing application that ships with that and might be causing the problem. Alternately you could be infected with miniature pevils that are running around your HD with pointy sticks.

1. Can you say me what I asked you for about autorun?
2. No MS Office yet. Searching for the reason.

trying to turn off autorun....you should be able to do that in the drive properties. If you turn off autorun but it still autoruns, your O/S is being stupid. No clue.

thrashing of the drive....I'd go into your task manager (crt + shift + esc), choose the processes tab, and click on the CPU column so it sorts by CPU usage. Then just wait for your thrashing to start and see what process is using up CPU at the time. That may help figure out what app is doing it.

1. What is difference between your second and first suggestion, then?

2. Lol, that's exactly what I was already doing for more than one hr, when your suggestion was cast. I got you got that. As well as that I'll take care of that problem by myself.

1. I just repeated my original suggestion. If that doesn't work, I don't know. You can try checking device manager, then the drive properties. They don't exist for me, but that may be because of hte chipset. You may want to see if any kind of disk detector icons exist in your control panel. I have some, but they were put there by my Creative drivers. Once again, it may not exist on your machine.

2. heh, good. I'll let you tackle this one.

1. The tip: don't repeat the tip which, even apperently, does not work in the prev step. You are not on the job nor I'm a stupid customer who cannot understand that you don't provide support for win 2003 server. Btw, when we talk about CREΛTIVE, I'm SB Live! user and use kX drivers, which I recommend to the most of you. Very powerful, neat and low-level integrated controls. The only thing which suck are SoundFonts controls but that's just forcing VST, imo.

2. Ehm, Mike, have you some antivirus thing on the mech? I.E. Kaspersky AVP? Thing can be very annoying if you don't spend about one hour to arse it to don't do the things you don't like.

I use AVG Antivirus. Free and decent. Not awesome, but decent. I don't know anythin gabout kX drivers for creative. Care to toss some linkage?

http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/index.php?skip=1

But careful! I haven't read what they wrote about the product but from personal xp know that it is best to don't have any driver (for your SB) installed before you do this. As well, I know of few issues when drivers refused to recognize the SB Live! as a compatibile device. Dunno why. Oh, yes - that were SB Lives modyfied to be some muts of Live and Audigy.

looks neat. I may give it a shot sometime. Thanks for the linkage.