Sorry missed that this was an OT thread > > William Chops Westfield wrote: > >> Roman wrote: > >>> Having spent a few days on the holidays playing with a friends new > >>> PC running windows XP, again it is noticeably slower than my win98 > >>> system, even though it has more ram and a faster processor. > >> > >> Well, presumably XP and ME were microsoft's lasp gasp attempt > >> to get people with 1GHz+ machines to buy new (faster) ones to > >> make up for the speed loss, thus improving the US economy and > >> making a bunch of people a bunch of money. It doesn't seem to > >> have worked, though. My 400MHz machines still seem to be > >> running most applications just fine, not that I'm what the industry > >> would call a power user ("gee, I guess a windows PC makes an > >> OK X terminal." :-) >I agree there - I've got a 500MHz K6-II with 128MB of RAM and an 80GB Maxtor >hard drive - the thing flies. I *may* upgrade to a 1GHz or faster machine, >but I'm keeping Win98. I've seen way too many WinXP machines crashing during >normal use. Win2k is nice, though. The only reason I'm using 98 instead of >95 is because of the "Windows Protection Error" bug - a timer in one of the >VxDs overflows, causes a divide-by-zero and locks the system. Microsoft >released a patch for OSR2 (v4.0.950B or 4.0.950C), but not Win95 release >(v4.0.950). That and Win98's FAT32 support is nice.To some extent... >Personally I prefer Slackware Linux. ReiserFS is pretty much bulletproof - >I've tripped over my Linux router's power cable umpteen thousand times and >it *still* boots perfectly after a filesystem log replay. I've found that my WinXP box runs fine. Far faster than my win98SE box on a k6II-300. A large number of the problems come from people who try to use WinXP with 256MB or less or RAM. WinXP seems to need about 300MB on average for system use. Now, while I agree that that is absurd, and there is no way that an OS should be using that much memory for itself, WinXP has given me very little trouble beyond that. With 512MB of RAM and an Athalon XP 1800+, my xp system beats the pants off of my 98SE box which is running a k6II-300 with 256MB of RAM. I've found that crash recovery for programs is far better in XP. I have never had explorer crash on me. Unlike 98SE, I can access my settings menu, where explorer crashes every time I do that on my 98SE box. I have had very few programs crash on me, and when they do, my system recovers beautifully, and continues running as though nothing had happened. A far cry from the typical win98 "every time an app crashes, you better reboot or something will give you the blue screen of death" About that crashing, I'd like to point out that I have had precisely two(2) system crashes since I started using XP in April. People give XP too much grief. It does a lot of things far better than 98 did. And its more stable. Frankly it's also built for newer machines. Who would consider running 95 on a 486 DX-50 with 4 MB of RAM? Considering that this is 5 years after 98, why would you try to run XP on a 98 era computer if you wouldn't run 95 on a DOS6 era computer? Now, with that rant out of the way, I should point out that I think Linux is, of course a far better solution for anything but gaming. With one problem: Try to find drivers for the brand a video card. Forget that your shiny new video card has more processing power than a typical 98 era computer, your still running at 640x480 until someone decides to release a driver When I tried to find Linux drivers for my Radeon 8500 in April 2002, the only listed support I could find was a company that was selling their driver for over 100USD. Why would I pay half the price of an expensive video card to get the driver? Just my $0.02. --Brendan -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics (like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics