I originally bought an older model MBOX 1 as it was being phased out and the prices were quite attractive. Unfortunately, I had a particular model of Dell computer that used a proprietary memory format, and since my computer was so old, it would cost me almost $700 to go from 512MB to 1GB. The memory and processor limitations were quite apparent to me and after several months of problems I put the guitar down and stopped using the system, intending to purchase a new system in the future.

About 14 months later, I bought a new PC, and it was a refurbished HP Pavilion Media Center with an AMD Phenom quad-core processor and 3GB of RAM and a 700-Gigabyte hard drive for less than $525. It was only available with Microsoft Vista Home Premium, but the price seemed excellent for the power of the machine. Lots of connectivity, tons of USB ports front and back, fire cable, lots of video in and out and all sorts of removable media slots, fast DVD burner. Overall, a big step up in computing from my 2003 Dell desktop. But there was a problem, digidesign didn’t write device drivers for MBOX 1 for Vista.

Being the IT guy that I am (pun intended), I wasn’t ready to give up with my dreams in hand. So, I decided to dual boot my system with XP and Vista. That’s when the second set of problems occurred. HP did not support this system on Windows XP and there were no HP-supplied device drivers.

Before I began my efforts to create a dual boot system on the HP Pavilion Media Center, I wanted to do as much research on device drivers as possible. To do this, I went into control panel and then “system” to see the device drivers. I wrote down as many details as possible about the device drivers, including the manufacture of the devices supported by the drivers, the version numbers of the drivers, and anything else that might be relevant to try to find comparable drivers for Windows XP for the hardware I was looking for. HP board. Pavilion Media Center PC. Once that was done, I started going to the chip, video, sound, and other manufacturers’ sites and searched their support sites for drivers that came closest to all the device drivers I needed.

I put all the drivers and driver documentation I had found on my USB drive and then set about preparing the dual boot aspect of the system. I created directors on my USB drive to get a functional organization map for the conductors. For example: “AudioDrivers”, “VideoDrivers”, “NetworkDrivers”, “IODrivers”, “ModemDrivers”, etc. I put what I thought were the best drivers for XP on these devices in each folder.

The next big hurdle was finding a good way to create a dual boot system by starting with a system already formatted with Microsoft Vista.

To do this, I did some research on the different ways to make a dual boot system. It had been years since I created a dual boot NT/Win 95 system and I needed a refresher course and didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a commercial dual boot system like Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0, which retails for around $50 and it’s worth it if you’re not comfortable with things like making changes to your boot files.

As a technical professional and someone trying to operate on a tight budget, I was going to find the free way to do this like I had years before and knew for my purposes that would be all I needed. After some research work on the internet, I followed the steps of an article I discovered titled How to Dual Boot Vista”.

As with any potentially destructive process, it is VERY IMPORTANT to back up your system before doing this. I have a home network and I did an image backup of my system on my wife’s system and I also backed up my most important data to DVD.

With the cost of off-site backup storage being so affordable and the many backup solutions available, there’s no excuse not to back up your system except laziness and that doesn’t count.

So, I completed the dual boot process and booted into Windows XP and then proceeded to go through the driver installation processes. Had some crashes with drivers and had to reboot my computer into Vista and do some more research on device drivers and download a few different graphics drivers but then everything worked great as far as HP and XP working together in the environment dual boot was concerned.

Now, in theory, I had a hotrod computer ready to go with my old MBOX 1 and ProTools LE. The floor had been paved. But that was only the beginning of my challenges. In the next article, I’ll write about the challenges of getting MBOX and ProTools LE to work fully with my system.