So I finally broke down and got a new computer. I guess I am a tool sucker, because much as I hate to admit it ended up going back to Dell. I picked up a new Dual Core machine (Inspiron 9400) and from the first looks of it, this thing really is a screamer. And this time around it looks like the hardware is in working condition.

I know, I know I was ranting and raving (what else is new) with my last order that I ended up sending back with kindest regards to Dell <g> because of the horrible, horrible customer service. However after digging around for other machines and doing a little more research I just couldn't find a better match than the Dell machine for what I was looking for.

Anyway, as soon as I got the machine I dumped XP Media Edition and threw on Windows 2003 as I do with all of my work computers. All went well, except for the Audio and Modem cards. I can live without the modem, but with out sound the machine is a bit annoying. The beep gets to be a headache in a hurry.

Anyway, the machine has a Sigmatel STAC 9200 audio card and the card's installer will not run on Windows 2003. Withou the installer it looks like the audio device is not showing up in the list of devices either, which means I haven't been able to install the WDM audio drivers manually either. I tried a bunch of things includnig running the installer and the various support service EXEs in Windows XP compatibility mode (which got further but still didn't want to go through).

Both the modem and the audio card are not registered and I see one Unknown PCI device in Device in device manager but it doesn't like either of these drivers. So much for plug and play.

I remember having similar problems with the Sigmatel drivers on my current machine, although there I managed to load the drivers manually.

Anybody have any idea how I can get the drivers loaded without the installer?

God I hate it when hardware manufacturers refuse to go the last few steps to get their drivers to run on Win2003. Especially Audio hardware which is WDM compliant should be a total cinch to get running on Win2003. I have a number of high end audio drivers I run on my old machine and none of these have any issue at all on 2003 even though they don't explicitly support it. This is probably just a matter of the installer blocking the loader.

Hope anybody has any idea.

This brings me back to the consideration of running XP instead of Windows 2003. I mainly run Win2003 because of Web Development – I create so many test applications and samples it's so much easier to manage that on Win2003 with multiple Web site support. The other XP issue is the 10 connection limit which seems to be a problem in some Web debugging scenarios. I've noticed when working with AJAX style apps against a local Web Server IIS will quickly start kicking back 'Too many connections' errors while debugging these types of apps. Apparently IIS is not releasing the connections properly on XP.

Also, I'm still supporting some ISAPI extensions and IIS configuration for Web Connection, and there it definitly pays to be able to work on the server as opposed to XP which behaves a bit differently for many things. I rather err on the side of getting it right for the server than the client os <g>.

Realistically these are the only major reasons I run Windows 2003 server. Doesn't seem like much does it when put like this, but given a choice I'd still much rather run 2003.

So if anybody has any ideas how I can get these drivers to work I'd love to hear the feedback. Meantime I'm going to get in line at Dell, although I'm pretty sure I know what the answer on that end will be – we don't support Windows 2003.