Disklavier

Greetings JORGE,

I bought a cute little HP Slimline mini desktop for a similar reason. It is small but much cheaper than a good laptop computer. The problem is that it is an HP (support means reformat your hard drive) and it had Vista. The network cards do not have XP drivers and probably never will. If you don't need the modem, you could remove the one PCI card and put a known wireless card in it and it might do all you need. I found the 'puter on Buy.com for just around $300. Another stupid thing HP did was to install 32 bit Vista on a machine with a dual core 64 bit processor.

Don't even think of running Vista on a machine with less than 2 G memory unless you are prepared to spend hours turning off every service and feature.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 1:19:52 PM, you wrote:
> Greeting Spencer, thanks, I really know what you mean.
> I am going to give Vista a last chance for my living room.
> The machine I have there is really old and ugly, you can imagine
> what my wife, sons and friends say about it.
> I will try the venerable Winamp tonight it seems it will work since
> the midi plug-in it has, handles both, the old "midi in-out" "MIDI
> Mapper" or the new "direct music"; here at the office it even offers
> me the "Yamaha CBX diver" option for MIDI out, let's see what
> happens with a real midi device plugged…
> Just imagine a nice looking, brand new, computer with Windows Vista
> running free WINAMP and playing an old midi piano roll on a Yamaha mark II upright DKV.
> Weird isn't it?
> Regards


> 2008/5/14 Spencer_Lists <lists@spencerserolls.com>:
> Greetings JORGE,

> I fiddled more with this last night. There are a couple of
> utilities out there that offer to change the default MIDI player for
> wmplayer and sites that suggest the registry setting that need to be
> changed. I fiddled for quite a while and had no success. I have
> written some programs that use the wmplayer and have been amazed at
> how difficult, undocumented and unpredictable it is. It is the
> typical microsoft pile of garbage in which they decide what the user
> wants and provide even less than this. 

> I wrote a simple "midi picker" that works on XP and will let you
> change the default player so media player will output to your chosen
> device. I tried to find the relevant registry settings to change in
> Vista and gave up. Everything I have had to modify in vista to make
> it just barely useable has taken hours and hours or days and some
> things are still evading me and even Microsoft. Don't ask me about
> the 17 hours I have spent on the phone with Microsoft trying to get
> Vista to network with my XP machines. 

> Vista plus MIDI plus media player is just too much Microsoft to
> have a chance of working. The Vista online midi pickers i tried don't work either.

> Media player is everywhere but it is useless for anything other
> than what Microsoft wants you to do with it. Any other player that I have tried is much better.

> I installed XP as a boot option on my new fast machine so I can
> boot to XP if I need to run something that does not work on Vista.
> However the computer manufacturer (HP) will not provide information
> on some of the board resources and network adapters regarding XP
> drivers. They are probably not even available so unless I rip the
> machine apart and replace everything but the box, I am pretty much
> stuck with Vista if I want all of the hardware to work.

> Bottom line: Stay as far away from Windows Media Player and Vista
> as you possibly can unless your goal in life is to waste countless
> days and increase your frustration. 


> Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 10:56:22 AM, you wrote:
>> Thanks Jhon, I agree, as mather of fact some months ago I installed
>> Vista in my desktop, after a week I uninstalled it.
>> I still use XP in my powerfull desktop.

>> I am trying to upgrade a very old and slow Pentiun IV I have in the
>> living room , connected to the DKV
>> (change it mainly for cosmetic reasons) 

>> 2008/5/14 konaneil <konaneil@...>:
>> You could install XP for the time being. On your new machine, with its
>> speed and memory, XP would run extremely well. This may sound odd but
>> around 200,000 computer professionals have signed a petition
>> <http://weblog.infoworld.com/save-xp/> requesting Microsoft not
>> discontinue XP at least until they have a stable release of Vista
>> working properly. 

> -- 
> Best regards,
> Spencer_Lists Chase mailto:lists@...
> 67550 Bell Springs Rd.
> Garberville, CA 95542 Postal service only.
> Laytonville, CA 95454 UPS only.
> Spencer@...
> http://www.spencerserolls.com
> http://www.spencerserolls.com/MidiValve.htm
> (707) 984-8356





-- 
Best regards,
Spencer_Lists Chase        mailto:lists@...
67550 Bell Springs Rd.
Garberville,  CA 95542    Postal service only.
Laytonville, CA 95454    UPS only.
Spencer@...
http://www.spencerserolls.com
http://www.spencerserolls.com/MidiValve.htm
(707) 984-8356