I thought the snowball would be too sensitive and pickup the hum of the aircon or the whirringsound of the 2-bay external hard drive near

I had a hard-drive failure and was forced to reinstall windows and, ever since then I've had a problem with my snowball not being detected on the system, but it works fine on other systems

Instead, they blame Microsoft and even suggest creating a separate XP-only partition on your hard drive so you can use this mic.

Very little background noise, even when cars and trucks are driving by.