Microsoft tools up XP

WAY BACK WHEN Microsoft showed off Windows 3.1, we were shocked to learn the company had taken to calling its Graphical User Interface an "operating system".

We protested of course. "It's not an operating system," we said. "It's just a GUI." How they laughed. But for us, DOS was the operating system, and, even back then, IBM were still flogging a version, and DR-DOS may have also still existed. Windows was just something pretty to stick on DOS and point at with a mouse.

And for us, the favourite DOS command of all was always FORMAT. Once you'd installed loads of useless and mutually incompatible software and totally messed up fiddling with your IRQs, you could always type "format c:" and start again.

Microsoft hijacked the Format command by incorporating a version into Windows from 95 onwards. But we could always get around that with a floppy. Now, in the days of floppy-free machines and, worse, USB ones that are only recognised once Windows has loaded, you try ridding a XP disk of any vestiges of XP code.

Microsoft has known about us Format freaks for a while and tolerated us. Many of course, turned to Partition Magic as a way of managing our disks as we saw fit. But we also imagined that if Windows was to be an operating system it, too, should allow us to manage our disks as we saw fit, even if that meant expunging all mention of XP from our disks and reverting to something less threatening, like Windows 98.

Anyhow, Microsoft has been beavering away on a new Utility to replace FDisk and Format in Windows XP, that it has named WinPE. Windows Pre installation Edition is a tool to manage XP and Windows 2000 disks. It's part of the push to get everyone migrated to Windows XP, which in turn is part of the push to get Microsoft managing the world's PCs.

EliteHW has gotten what it calls a "sneek peak" at WinPE. They say: "WinPE lets you create (diskpart.exe) and format (format.com) disk partitions, and gives you access to both NTFS file system partitions (with some constraints) and your internal network. The environment supports all mass storage devices that use Windows 2000 or Windows XP drivers, and you can incorporate additional drivers as new devices become available." For more, wibble this way.

Ok, back to mobo land, and here's what looks like an interesting new Asus board popping up in China. The Pentyum 4 board sports a Sis648 chipset with AGP 8X, and the rest we can't discern...

Hexus.net have posted couple of new board reviews. There's a new review of MSI's KT3 Ultra2-BR board. it's got Bluetooth an veerything, over here. And they cast an eye over EPoX's EP-4G4A for middle-of-the-road overclockers, over here.

Ocworkbench posts proof that Albatron's KX400+ PRO is based on the KT333 + 8235 South bridge not the 8233A, they say. Have a look here.

Hardwaretech say they've built the "The Ultimate $1500 Dual Monitor/Dual Processor RAID 0 Workstation", over here.

Neoseeker has a round up of 40XCD biurners over here.

There's another look at Shuttle's dinky XPC SS51 over here at Tech report.

And a thread on Ace's Hardware on the ongoing benchmarking row kicks of over here.

For a post in the Daily Wibble mail the Wibbler here. µ