Has Microsoft made any progress towards fixing these multitasking headaches I have en

[NewsBot]

I am running Windows NT 5.1 Media Center 2005 Edition with all of the latest patches as of last weekend. I have an Intel Core 2 Duo dual core processor and Intel's ICH9R set to ACHI, enabling NCQ on my hard drive. I also have PerfectDisk 7.0 set to defragment the hard drive nightly, so I do not worry about disk fragmentation. I recently replaced my boot drive with a 750GB Western Digital hard drive and I have not had much of a chance to recover data from my old boot drive until yesterday.

 

Yesterday, I attached my old boot drive to my computer using an SATA to USB cable that I had ordered from Newegg. I was copying video files to my new boot drive while installing my All-in-one HP Photosmart printer. A dialog appeared from the setup script saying to attach and turn on my printer. I stupidly clicked yes before actually turning it on. When I went to turn it on, it would not turn on. After a bit of troubleshooting, I found out that the cable attached to its power brick had come off and reattached it. I proceeded to turn it on, Windows detected it and then promptly froze (although, I could still move the cursor and Alt-Tab through windows, most of which were not responding, including Firefox after fifteen minutes or so).

 

I was tempted to do a hard reset, but since I was installing HP's drivers, which HP included the kitchen sink as far as software extras go, I did not want to go through the trouble of fixing the messed up installation, so hoping that windows would resolve whatever problem it had by itself, I waited for more than an hour. I received a delayed write failure message and figured that it was because Windows had frozen. Eventually, I decided that a hard reset was necessary and proceeded to disconnect the hard drive I had attached with the SATA to USB adapter. Windows suddenly came to life, my installation proceeded as planned and the recording of the 2004 presidential debate I was copying failed to copy.

 

Today, I was playing with the DivX converter, converting an old recording of Dr. Dolittle 2 to DivX while installing Age of Empires III. When the Age of Empires III setup asked me for Disk 2, I inserted it and clicked "Ok" on the prompt. Windows promptly froze (and by froze, I mean that I could not even move the cursor) for a few seconds while the disk spun-up.

 

When things like this happen, many people, myself in the past included, would reboot the computer doing far more harm than good, but I would expect things like this to not paralyze the system. Has Microsoft made any progress towards ensuring that these things do not happen with NT 5.1 SP3 and/or NT 6.0?

 

 

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