29 May 2009

Back to the Dark Ages

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I'm back to dual-booting the MSI Wind - Mac OS X Leopard & Windows XP Professional. Though with an almost perfect setup (don't forget about the internal mic that still doesn't work what with VoodooHDA already installed), I've found out that there are things that only Windows XP can give me.

Mainly two things: (1) torrenting and (2) video streaming

Okay, there's a ton of fairly good torrent clients for Mac but based from experience, uTorrent is sluggish. I've changed to Transmission and then also, I've scourged the net high and low to research on speeding up the download speed. But the results only pointed to one thing: torrenting, or to be more specific, ways to speed up torrenting remain Windows-centric.

As for streaming; I'm a fan of asian drama's and youtube. What has always puzzled me is that I seem to always have "connection problems". I've been blaming it all on my broadband provider when all this time, it s simply because Flash has a notorious reputation in Mac OS X. Though only blessed with hackintoshes and not real Macs, I've become an OS X fan-girl in that I now know where my loyalties lie operating system-wise. So I even did what I could: update Safari, Firefox and install the lates Adobe Flash player, version 10 as of this writing. I even told myself that I was just too impatient by not letting the vid load first before hitting the play button, so I waited for the vid to fully load first but what do I get? Laggy video. Yep.

I first tried to install XP on my HP Mini since it didn't contain any important file of mine - it's currently my experiment workhorse - and plugged in the ethernet cable, fired up IE, installed Flash player went to my fave video streaming site and...

Epiphany. Succint enlightment.

I discovered that videos uploaded on streaming sites weren't cursed with a spell that I call "slow-motion-syndrome" -- not at all.

As for torrenting; I downloaded uTorrent and did some tweaking, fetched a torrent and left it downloading overnight. Guess what; the following morning when I woke up, the 1.5 GB file I wanted to DL was sitting there in my folder alright. It was done in just that span of time. Whereas back when I was torrenting in Mac OS X, uTorrent and Transmission alike, overnight would be equal to about 500 MB worth of downloaded data. And I was being graceful at that since I've rounded it up.

To make a long story with lots of boring installation parts short; I've made room for Win XP on the MSI Wind. For an OS that I've sworn to despise, I've given half of the Wind's hard disk real estate to it.

There was some snag on which I got caught while setting up my dual boot. I learned something new:

"chain0". Yep.

PC_EFI Chameleon v12 wouldn't boot up my Win XP installation so this was what I resorted to.

Click here for the details.

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