Performance between Windows OS's

Archives Forums/Win32 Discussion/Performance between Windows OS's

MattVonFat(Posted 2005) [#1]
Hi.

I'm planning to get XP on my computer but i havent got the money. we do have an old Windows 98 CD lying around so i was thinking of putting that on.

Alot of the games come sayign they will work on 98 so iw as just wondering whether there would be any differences in the performances of the OS's?

I remeber WIndows 98 being slow but i would have guessed that was just because we had a older hardware like the Pentium 2 (which after recently excavating it from our old comp i notice to be quite interesting.).

Thanks for any help
Matt


MattVonFat(Posted 2005) [#2]
Sorry, i have no idea why i posted this here...


TartanTangerine (was Indiepath)(Posted 2005) [#3]
One of my test machines has a pIII 600Mhz with 128MB ram and Win98 SE. It absolutely flies. One of my other machines with a similar spec but using XP is as slow as a dog (with 1 leg).


Why0Why(Posted 2005) [#4]
The Ram is what kills XP. If you double to 256 it makes a tremendous difference.


TartanTangerine (was Indiepath)(Posted 2005) [#5]
True but these are test systems, if my stuff don't run on these then there is no point releasing until it does.


xlsior(Posted 2005) [#6]
Alot of the games come sayign they will work on 98 so iw as just wondering whether there would be any differences in the performances of the OS's?


All things being equal, Win98 will typicall be faster than XP on the same computer.
(Exception: if you have multiple CPU cores or a dual CPu motherboard, win98 will only be able to use one of them, while XP can use both)

XP, on the other hand, is more stable than Win98, and poorly written applications are less likely to crash a system running XP than one running 98.


D4NM4N(Posted 2005) [#7]
get another old harddisk and boot-switch in the bios. you can hae the best of both worlds :)


Boulderdash(Posted 2005) [#8]
I used to run windows 98 on both my PC's ,After changing to WinXP ,My 3d Graphics programs ran at A-LOT-FASTER Frame rate, Of course If your computer is an old slow-as-mud one then I recommend a 3 pound hammer, as no self respecting wizard of a 3d programmer would be seen dead on old shit hardware anyway.


VP(Posted 2005) [#9]
There are an increasing number of OEM's now not supporting Windows 98 at all.

I might have this wrong, but ISTR that Creative do not have up-to-date drivers available for their higher-end sound cards for Windows 98, only Windows XP.

Won't be long before the likes of NVidia and ATI follow.

Personally, the idea of installing Windows 98 on my machine disgusts me. It would cripple the poor thing!

Also, WinXP is not the memory hog it is portrayed as. With a little bit of work, XP can be slimmed down quite dramatically. However, with 512MB of memory costing less than a meal for two at a cheap restaurant, is there any excuse not to upgrade?


Leiden(Posted 2005) [#10]
You can use XPLite or nLite to slim down your xp installation quite dramatically. A fresh reboot on my system consumes 48mb of memory -- and im still using Luna. You can always get extra performance at the expense of wasted space by using Fat32 with XP. I'm using Fat on my 80GB hdd and I scored an additional 1200 disk-bech marks. nVidia is already dropping support for Win98 as the Win9x drivers already are beginning to lack updates. Dont know about Ati though.


xlsior(Posted 2005) [#11]
You can always get extra performance at the expense of wasted space by using Fat32 with XP


You also give up some additional features by doing so: without NTFS you can't have file access restrictions one a user-by-user base, and you can't use the built-in NTFS 'compress' option to shrink down little used files.


VP(Posted 2005) [#12]
With FAT, you are also more prone to data loss due to the pretty awful way that the whole filesystem is implemented.

NTFS has its faults, but it's the best we've got until Vista comes along and we get to use a real filesystem (i.e. a journalling one).

Of course, we should all be able to upgrade to the intel version of Apple's OSX within the next 18 months :) I will be dumping Windows just as soon as I possibly can when that little beauty gets released.


xlsior(Posted 2005) [#13]
NTFS has its faults, but it's the best we've got until Vista comes along and we get to use a real filesystem (i.e. a journalling one).


Um... WinFS won't be part of Vista when it launches, it won't be ready any time soon... Still going to be NTFS.

And even after it gets released, WinFS will 'just' be a set of drivers on top of NTFS itself, so you are still limited to what it can (or can't) do.


VP(Posted 2005) [#14]
xlsior:

I firmly believe that M$ will come up with a better filesystem for the release of Vista, or at the very least one of the server versions. To not offer a journalling filesystem with a modern server OS would be a bit mad.

Knowing M$, they will probably do something truly awful with its implementation (like emulating NTFS thereby using up loads of processor time) but the idea will be sound.

They will have to come up with something new in the storage department if they are to make good on their promise of supporting hard drives with medium to large flashRAM storage built in.


xlsior(Posted 2005) [#15]
I firmly believe that M$ will come up with a better filesystem for the release of Vista, or at the very least one of the server versions. To not offer a journalling filesystem with a modern server OS would be a bit mad.


Don't hold your breath...