General DirectX 9.0 question

briggins wrote on 10/24/2003, 10:04 AM

I'm still using DirectX8.0 on my WindowsXP machine. I remember reading posts about DirectX9.0 that sounded very ominous. I'd like to find out if there is anything I need to be aware of or concerned about before moving to 9.0. Note that I have XP Pro with no service packs loaded. Will I need to load SP1 or 2?

Thanks in advance.

Bruce

Comments

laz wrote on 10/25/2003, 3:31 AM

I'd recommend installing all sp's. Is there any reason you haven't? It'll make things work better. Sometimes M$ updates can mess things up but they always sort things out if enough people complain. If I get probs with updates I uninstall then install them at a later date when they've ironed out the bugs. I'd get DX9, it'll improve performance. There are tools out there to uninstall it if needs be, but the posted probs re DX9 are probably related to other conflicts.

briggins wrote on 11/3/2003, 12:53 PM

Thanks. I loaded DirectX 9.0 and everything seems fine. But I did find some information with regards to XP SP1. It appears that many users experience a significant performance degradation after "upgrading" to SP1. Microsoft has acknowledged this in a knowledge base article that I read. From what I can tell this issue will not be addressed until SP2. I think I'll wait and leave well enough alone for the time being.

Bruce

briggins wrote on 11/12/2003, 11:54 PM

So I took the next step and installed XP SP1a. What a mistake!!!! Since I completed the installation two days ago my computer has rebooted 4 times. One time it started the reboot sequence and rebooted again before it even got to the blue login screen. What a f#&*!ing mistake. I now have no faith in the stability of my system. The bug analysis from Microsoft indicates that it is a driver problem. But I didn't install any new drivers and from what I can find out, all of the drivers I had installed before SP1 are the latest drivers. Thanks Microsoft.

Stiffler wrote on 11/13/2003, 12:28 AM

Do you get any messages before your computer reboots?

(I'm just wondering if you got the Blaster worm).

briggins wrote on 11/14/2003, 11:54 PM

The blaster worm wasn't the culprit. This was different and I finally tracked it down. I noticed that I kept getting literally streams of DCOM errors in the event log. It was complaining about not being able to start the stisvc (still image service). Still image... Hmmm... The only still image device I've got is a piece of crap HP scanner that caused problems when I first installed on NT, when I installed it on a clean XP system and now when I loaded XP SP1a. I removed a couple of registry entries that triggered some scanner services to start on reboot and the DCOM messages went away and I haven't had any problems since. My advice for people looking for a good scanner -- avoid HP. The device itself is nice but the programmers that wrote the drivers should be hung by their fingernails until they are no longer able to type.

Thanks for the tip though, that was one of my first thoughts.

Bruce