"...RE: BFD2 its not as great sounding out of the box as Addictive drums or NI Abbey Road drums, but if you have no virtual drum plugins at all and have $29 burning a hole in your pocket, or if you want another plugin for doubling kicks and snares with a different sample set, might be worth a look.
"However Len, I'm trying to understand you comment since I also have a xp system. Does the BFD echo not work on an xp system?"
Ahjay, I bought it yesterday, and just got the code this afternoon to install it. It works on xp. On the download site it also has a version you can download, earlier version, that is recommended for xp. At least it did for a little audition I did after I installed it. I think Andy's right, it sounds like crap out of the box,lol, or at least some of the presets. I thought maybe because it doesn't have as many layers or articulations as the full version. There are also expansion paks that also work on eco, just not as many layers or articulations, but they start at $50, and so I guess you are making a small gamble there. I thought the oak kit sounded really good. You can get it from
http://audiodeluxe.com/products/fxpansion-bfd-eco for $25.99, as someone mentioned in the addictive drums post. The current version is 1.5 with an update I believe, on your download site, the 1.0x version, is also there recommending it for xp. If the 1.5 doesn't work try the 1.0, I downloaded the 1.5 and update.
Also on the same site, steven slate drums 4.0 EX is $84.99, it has 25 kits and turkish cymbals, or for $39 on the SS website there is a custom kit with one kit and a couple extra snares and kicks. The SS versions aren't cut down or changed in any way from the platinum, just fewer kits and instruments, 100 vs 25 vs 1. You have to register at audio deluxe to see the lower price in your cart. It's a tough decision, but if I didn't already have some of the ocean way drum kits, I would go with the slate ex, it has the most essential kits from the platinum version, and the others from the platinum kinda sound redundant, so for about double the price of the custom(single kit) from slate, you get 25 times the kits. I probably should have just bought the slate ex, I mean if I bought an expansion oak kit cut down version and echo, it's nearly the same price. The SS drums sound fantastic imo, at least the audio demos on the website.