[Users] virt-io drivers for windows xp

[Martijn Grendelman]

Hi,

>>> I have been playing with the VirtIO drivers from mentioned ISO on
>>> Windows XP, but I experienced a lot of BSODs.
>>>
>>> In the end, I set NICs to emulate as rtl8139 and disks as IDE, and that
>>> seems to work.
>>>
>> Many thanks,
>> infact during creation of windows vm I have chosen the "windows" option in
>> vm wizard. 
>> I cannot guess that the wizard made a "strange" choice using virtio drivers
>> when for windows is best to use ide and rtl.
> 
> The choice is not strange given:
> 1) availability of virtual floppy with virtio drivers
> 2) dreadful performance of emulated devices compared to virtio ones
> 
> The minor annoyance during installation (need to attach a floppy and do
> F6/Load Drivers) really pays off.

Like I said, Windows XP kept crashing a lot (reproducible crash on
shutdown and more random crashes during normal operation) with the
VirtIO drivers. I'm not sure if it was network or disk, but it didn't
work well, that's for sure. With the IDE/RTL8139 combination, XP has
been running stable for a few weeks now.

Regards,
Martijn.