Get past all that, however, and the first question that comes to mind (to us anyway) is “But is it any faster?” In the past, the tendency has been for newer Microsoft operating systems to run more slowly on older hardware, but offer performance benefits on well-equipped systems. Windows XP offers a new twist in that it’s designed to bridge the gap between the 9x kernel and the NT kernel. How does Windows XP stack up from a performance standpoint, compared not only to Windows 2000, but to Windows ME?
Apart from InfoWorld’s results, which show WinXP to be much slower than Win2K, not much research has been done one the performance characteristics of Microsoft’s new operating system. Since Windows XP stands to replace both Windows 2000 and Windows ME, it seems appropriate to compare the new OS to its predecessors on a variety of tests; simply throwing a couple of Office tests at these OSes won’t do them justice. Additionally, given the past importance of hardware on the results, testing on one platform would be inadequate. Therefore, we’ve compiled a wide array of synthetic and real world benchmarks, on both a high-end and low-end test platform, to determine the ultimate Windows performance king.
Is WinXP a dud? Is the 9x core really that dated? Is there a reason to upgrade from Windows 2000? Read on and find out.
The players
Before we get into the performance benchmarks, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the operating systems in question. We’ve chosen the most recent (pre-WinXP) versions of Microsoft’s business and home operating systems to compare to the newly released WinXP.
Using Windows 2000 is a no-brainer here, but the choice of ME might ruffle a few feathers. Some might argue that Windows 98 or 98SE would be a better choice. However, Microsoft (at least their marketing department) claims that WinME is the pinnacle of the 9x kernel and the immediate predecessor to Windows XP. We decided to take MS at their word, which means ME is the best choice to represent the 9x kernel. We don’t use 9x-based OSes for benchmarking much here at TR; we’re NT snobs, so it’s all 2000 or XP. Because XP forever banishes the 9x core from Microsoft’s OS stable, it’s only fair that we give it one last chance to go down in a blaze of glory.
Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run three times, and the results were averaged.
Our test systems were configured as follows:
The test systems’ Windows desktops were set at 1024×768 in 32-bit color at a 75Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.
For both WinME and WinXP, the System Restore utility was disabled. Otherwise, the OSes were left in their default configurations with no tweaking. Both XP and 2000 were installed on NTFS partitions; WinME was installed on a FAT32 partition due to its lack of NTFS support.
We used the following versions of our test applications:
- SiSoft Sandra Standard 2001.3.7.50
- ZD Media Business Winstone 2001 1.0.2
- ZD Media Content Creation Winstone 2001 1.0.2
- SysMark 2001 Patch 3
- POV-Ray for Windows version 3.1g
- ScienceMark 1.0
- SPECviewperf 6.1.2
- MadOnion 3DMark 2001 Build 200
- Quake III: Team Arena
- Max Payne v1.02
All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.
SiSoft Sandra’s Stream
SiSoft Sandra’s Stream memory benchmark is up first. Ideally, we want to see identical values for each OS, as this is really just a straight up memory bandwidth test. There’s really no reason for our OSes to differ here, but we’ll check just to be thorough.
SiSoft Sandra’s Stream memory benchmark is up first. Ideally, we want to see identical values for each OS, as this is really just a straight up memory bandwidth test. There’s really no reason for our OSes to differ here, but we’ll check just to be thorough.
FPU-wise, the OSes are identical.
With ALU scores being essentially identical, we know that none of the OSes are constraining things on the memory bandwidth front. This applies for both the high-end and low-end systems, which differ both in amount of RAM and memory bandwidth.
With that formality out of the way, let’s get onto some more interesting tests.
ZD Winstones
First up for our real world tests is ZD’s Winstone suites. These tests are important for two reasons: First, they represent the kind of usage you would likely find in a real work environment. Additionally, they should provide a good counterpoint to InfoWorld’s tests which indicate that, at least with Office XP, business tasks are much slower in Windows XP. The Winstone suite, however, uses Office 2000 and a much more diverse set of tests.
Our high-end machine sees a steady and measurable increase in performance going from Windows ME, to Windows 2000, to Windows XP. While the margin of WinXP’s lead is small, it’s certainly outside the margin of error. WinME falls just below 2000 in performance, a possible sign of its aging 9x core.
On the low-end machine, the results are less dramatic. The Business Winstone test isn’t that taxing to begin with, and it’s likely the 256MB of RAM in our low-end box that’s keeping XP and 2000 from putting in better performances. Still, despite their larger footprints, the two NT-based OSes don’t lose any ground to WinME.
The more demanding Content Creation test sees our high-end machine pull off a slightly more decisive victory in XP than it did in our Business test. Windows ME really suffers here; it seems the 9x core just can’t keep up with the higher demands of the Content Creation test.
Even on the low-end machine, WinME scores well behind the other OSes. WinXP takes a bigger lead over 2000 with this test, making it the clear performance leader on both hardware platforms.
BapCo SysMark 2001
Like ZD’s Winstone tests, SysMark run two test suites to simulate general business and content creation environments. Will SysMark’s results continue the trends seen with the ZD tests?
Like ZD’s Winstone tests, SysMark run two test suites to simulate general business and content creation environments. Will SysMark’s results continue the trends seen with the ZD tests?
For Office Productivity, yes. At the high end, XP takes another victory over 2000, and Windows ME is once again third. The differences in performance aren’t huge, but XP still manages to establish a clear lead.
Our low-end machine continues XP’s winning streak, but with a smaller margin than the high-end box. Windows ME’s core shows its age, placing a distant third.
Moving to the more demanding Internet Content Creation tests, WinXP takes its first loss to Win2K on our high-end test bed. With only System Restore disabled, it’s possible this loss is due to some of the additional features that XP has over Windows 2000, such as the new GUI. Windows ME continues to take a beating.
The situation is repeated on the low end; WinXP loses to 2000 by a small margin, while WinME brings up the rear.
ScienceMark
Next we move our testing parameters to the world of number crunching with ScienceMark. Running simulations of things I haven’t a prayer of understanding, ScienceMark at least produces some results that are easy to read. Let’s take a look.
At the high end, XP and 2000’s overall scores closely follow each other, and Windows ME lags again. ScienceMark is a computationally intensive test, and as such it sees a significant performance increase moving to the NT core. With results so close between XP and 2000, I’m going to have to call this one a draw.
With our low-end hardware, the high-end trend persists as 2000 and XP are too closely matched to call. ME’s 9x core prevents ScienceMark from leveraging the full computational potential of the hardware, and it stays in last place.
POV-Ray
From scientific math to 3D rendering, the POV-Ray test measures the time required to perform a raytrace rendering.
POV-Ray cares more about a machine’s hardware rather than its operating system. Given equal hardware, all the operating systems offer essentially the same performance on this test.
SPECviewperf
Delving further into the world of 3D, is SPEC’s viewperf suite, designed to measure 3D workstation performance. SPEC’s tests run the gamut, from wire frames to fully textured objects.
Delving further into the world of 3D, is SPEC’s viewperf suite, designed to measure 3D workstation performance. SPEC’s tests run the gamut, from wire frames to fully textured objects.
The SPEC scores all displayed very similar trends; the benchmark displayed no preference for Windows 2000 or Windows XP on either test system, turning in virtually identical numbers on each test for each of the NT kernel operating systems. The Windows ME SPEC scores seem to indicate a driver problem with the high-end test machine; it scored substantially lower than the low-end machine on all of the tests. Regardless, WinME once again comes in decidedly last.
3DMark 2001
All work and no play makes this benchmarking monkey, well, bored; let’s get to some gaming benchmarks. Taking care of our synthetic Direct3D needs is MadOnion’s 3DMark 2001.
All work and no play makes this benchmarking monkey, well, bored; let’s get to some gaming benchmarks. Taking care of our synthetic Direct3D needs is MadOnion’s 3DMark 2001.
Windows 2000 gets a marginal victory over XP with our high-end system, but one well within a margin of error. Windows ME trails significantly; it seems even gamers have no reason to choose the 9x core.
At the low end, there’s little difference between scores, almost certainly because of a video card bottleneck; our MX is likely flailing to keep up in 3DMark 2001, no matter what OS is running.
Vulpine GLMark
From DirectX to OpenGL, Vulpine’s GLMark synthetic benchmark is up next.
The performance picture continues 3DMark’s Direct3D pattern: scores for the high-end show XP and 2000 tied, with WinME lagging appreciably. Video card limitations result in a three-way tie on the low-end system.
Quake 3: Team Arena
Enough synthetic benchmarks, let’s move into the real world with some Quake 3: Team Arena. Will 2000 and XP continue to match each other? Can Windows ME claw its way back into the picture? Let’s find out.
Enough synthetic benchmarks, let’s move into the real world with some Quake 3: Team Arena. Will 2000 and XP continue to match each other? Can Windows ME claw its way back into the picture? Let’s find out.
Team Arena’s Fastest graphics setting has a great, um, personality. Unfortunately, it’s severely lacking in eye candy. It appears our high-end Windows ME driver issue is rearing its ugly head again, as the high-end system gets embarassed by the low-end box. That anomoly aside, with the detail turned down, all of the operating systems put in a relatively good performance.
Moving to High Quality changes things somewhat. Windows 2000 and XP are still neck and neck, while Windows ME takes a huge hit. It’s difficult to say if the high-end system’s WinME performance can be blamed on our driver issue or not; since this tiem it manages to beat the low-end system, we’ll blame the low numbers on Windows ME itself and not our driver bug.
With everything maxed out, our high-end picture really doesn’t change. While ME’s score looks more and more like a credible performance, it’s still well below the XP/2000 tag team. On the low end, things get more interesting. Windows 2000 pulls out a much better slideshow than both XP and ME as the GeForce2MX struggles with the high-resolution environment. It’s unclear why Windows 2000 does better in this scenario, but it’s largely academic, since nobody is going to want to play Quake 3 with their frame rate in the teens anyway.
Max Payne
To round out our benchmarking suite, Max Payne makes an appearance. Max contrasts Team Arena’s OpenGL with Direct3D rendering.
To round out our benchmarking suite, Max Payne makes an appearance. Max contrasts Team Arena’s OpenGL with Direct3D rendering.
In a result that will surprise no one, Windows XP and Windows 2000 are in a dead heat, while Windows ME brings up the rear, albeit not as badly as in some of the other tests. The trend is the same on the high-end and low-end machines.
Max (no pun intended) out the resolution and the high-end picture remains the same. The low-end gets pretty barren, as Windows XP and Windows ME both fail to complete the benchmark. At least we’ve learned that if you want to run a Max Payne slide show at 1600×1200 on a Geforce 2 MX, Windows 2000 is your best choice. If you ever decide this is a good idea, seek help.
Conclusions
Toss aside the WPA, the bundled services, and the new GUI (especially the new GUI) and you’re left with this fact: The numbers don’t lie. Regardless of how you feel about all the aforementioned goodies that Microsoft claims make Windows XP better than its predecessors, based on our tests, there’s no reason to call XP a performance dud.
Toss aside the WPA, the bundled services, and the new GUI (especially the new GUI) and you’re left with this fact: The numbers don’t lie. Regardless of how you feel about all the aforementioned goodies that Microsoft claims make Windows XP better than its predecessors, based on our tests, there’s no reason to call XP a performance dud.
Given all of the new, err, features it’s actually somewhat surprising how close the performance race is between XP and 2000. The fact that XP does so well with SysMark and the Winstone tests would indicate that it’s quite a business performer, at least with the software used in those benchmark suites. It’s difficult to say why InfoWorld’s results were so different; one possible suspect is not enough RAM, but that’s difficult to verify since they didn’t reveal how much memory was in their test systems.
Still, if you’re running Windows 2000, XP isn’t much of a compelling upgrade in terms of raw performance. By themselves, the performance gains you will see don’t justify the upgrade price and additional baggage. WinXP doesn’t really need anything above our low-end system to be useful, though it does seem to have an appetite for RAM. Luckily, RAM is the cheapest it’s ever been.
Windows XP signifies the end of the 9x core. Based on our tests, users of WinME (and likely any other 9x-based OS), should upgrade immediately. WinME just can’t keep up with the NT core, and upgraders will see large improvements in stability as well.
Between the new GUI, the WPA and the feature creep, there are plenty of reasons to bag on Windows XP, but performance isn’t one of them. Bloated or not, from a performance standpoint, Windows XP is a worthy successor to 2000.
*[http://www.winstone.com<]§ and download Winbench 99 or better yet, order a copy of Winstone 2002 to find out for yourself.
Ever since service pack 1 was released for XP I can honestly say that my system has been rock solid, without one single blue screen, application hang, or other system instability. My system runs 24/7 and I carry out multiple tasks during the day and also have a number of automated tasks running every night. I have yet to experience any downtime due to instability ever since I installed service pack 1. I have tested dozens of different software packages with out any problems. For those of you that still are having problems with XP or think there is a great difference in performance, do your self a favor and DO YOUR HOMEWORK.
Driver bug?
9x’s performance drop from 256MB to 512MB is well documented.
Not a driver bug.
I think the hardware is now all “low end”, but even now most people I know do NOT have more than 128MB of RAM, or perhaps 256 at best. I would guess that of the people I know, 80% have 256MB or less. I think the tests are pretty good, but I would have likes to have seen results for 95, 98, & 98SE, but then I understand I wasn’t the one taking the time to do them 😉
And I think the tests should have been done with either 128 or 256MB of RAM. I bet putting in tons of RAM slanted the scored towards the new OS some, how much…don’t know…
Mr Gerbil has a lot to say for himself, but despite all the politics I generally agree with him. 6 PCs ranging from 200Mhz Pentium Pro (96Mb) to 550Mhz Celeron, 4 running Win 2k, 2 running Win 98SE. Observations, Win 2k on a Pentium Pro with IIS installed does not work with 96Mb RAM, the machine stalls regularly for such long periods that I keep thinking it’s crashed. (ii) As Win 2k stresses your system out more reliability issues are reversed an Overclocked Pentium II (300 / 450) has an uptime in excess of 4 hours with Win 98, with Win 2k it has never made it passed 2.
(III) An operating system requiring 512Mb of RAM as ideal is beyond ridiculous! Not so long ago you needed a bios upgrade to use a hard drive any bigger than that. (IV) Subjective tests indicated it’s all about the hard drive! After removing IIS, and setting up a SCSI raid O on the Pentium Pro, for browsing and office Apps it kept up with the rest and left the Pentium II 300 standing (4500rpm Hard Disk / 128Mb Ram)…
My final thought (I am not a gamer) we have gone backwards not forwards, there is a PC #7 and it’s a 486-dx5/133 (used for testing web pages, it has 48Mb Ram, Win 95, IE5 and 0ffice 97 guess what? From power up to desktop it leaves everthing (including the Athlon 1800 in the studio) standing… from Desktop to dial-up, it wins again. In fact this PC can go from power off to open a word document.. save as, close, shut down, power off before any of the Win 2k machines can get to the log on screen.
I wonder how Gem would run on an 2gig intel?
Anonymous Gerbil you need to get your head out of your ass. AMD procs are not junk you are right they do not perform with CAD systems. THEY WERE NOT DESIGNED TO!!!!!!!! They were designed for gamming not Office work. Doooh
obviously, these findings are inconclusive until you test with a Pentium 4. After all, that is what XP was optimized for.
And another thing…I like the fact that I am ensured that no one else can use my exact copy of XP. I have friends that live in 250,000 dollar houses but steal serial codes and don’t pay for software licenses at all. THAT is what isn’t fair.
Tell my why I should upgrade to a new OS that I will have to start paying an annual fee to use at some point in time?? Everyone knows what is coming down the road with this WAP thing. Avoid it as long as possible.
Your low end system is fine for individuals/corps. going out to buy a new computer and looking for top grade hardware, but is unrealistic for real business users. Your hardware is all very nice, but not likely to be found in any store bought PC. ABit motherboard … oooh verrry verry expensive …. .Generally in my experience, most home users don’t upgrade, until they buy new systems. I generally recommend my friends pull down all the bug-fixes .. err… enhancements and apply them. Most businesses on the otherhand (probably the largest market), don’t generally upgrade the hardware as frequently, so a test system with a 400MHz CPU and cheap hardware would have been a better test for low end. You should have add one more OS to your tests… Linux.
I don’t think your “Low-end” system goes back far enoung. In a Real World office, my newest machines are P1.0’s, the very next to newest are P3 600’s. Half the office is running PII 400’s. Let’s see some comparisons on 400-600 MHz machines, a realistic platform for companies with 2-3 year old hardware.
And let’s show some real tests – Win2K has the Win98 code bloat, so it’s not going to run much better than XP. Let’s see XP vs. NT4.0, let’s see XP vs. 98, better yet let’s throw in 95 just to see if there really has been any progress, or just code bloat and faster hardware.
If you have a bad driver, how can you test the systems against eachother?<BR>
<BR>
If you use a different filesystem for the machines, how can you test the systems against eachother?<BR>
<BR>
Instead of following like sheep the Microsoft BS:<BR>
“However, Microsoft (at least their marketing department) claims that WinME is the pinnacle of the 9x kernel”<BR>
<BR>
Who cares what MS says? Test Win98SE as well if you want to. MS is going to “recommend” testing against ME if it suits them.<BR>
<BR>
“Based on our tests, users of WinME (and likely any other 9x-based OS), should upgrade immediately.”
<BR>
Oh yeah, OK, I’ll upgrade cos you guys with your inaccurate testing say to do it… Do MS own this site or something?
What I don’t understand is why no one is testing the systems as a regular users would have the system configured. Info world test followed the MS suggestions and turned off several sub-systems including anti-aliased fonts in both XP and W2K. Well, most users wouldn’t know those sub-systems exist, let alone be able to turn them off. Several benchmarks from other sources say that XP is 25% slower than W2K and they didn’t turn anything off. Before you can say the XP is faster than W2K you need to compare how people use it first.
???? I don’t get it. My experience is that on my system (which is very similar to the high end test system) I got BETTER results with the win 9X OS than with XP. 200 – 300 points better in 3DMark2001. I was not using ME – I used Windows 98. Is 98 better than ME?
I will say though, that my XP experience has been favorable overall – hasn’t crashed once (except when I was playing around with overclocking ; )).
Yeah, well, let’s make it a little more real world by dealing with today’s hardware. Most of the businesses (that’s more machines than home users) AND home users use Intel Chips and have optimized code for the later machines. You could have also used a P4 as your main machine, that way you could have shown the impact of the bus speed and faster RAM (since HALF of your stupid tests mainly tested the speed of the hardware or the driver of the hardware). Come on, don’t waste our time. Also, tell us how many times you had to reset the 9x box after benchmarks while the other boxes performed like champs – not needing reboots between tests.
Also a little more realworld, try it out on some laptops, so that college and traveling business people can see the performance difference (some may say that’s what the lowend benchmarks were for). Let’s see how long it also takes them to go to sleep, to wake up, to come back from hibernate, etc. How long do the AMD’s go before stepping down in speed vs the Intel under the various OS’s and their power profiles.
That’s what would have been interesting. Your video card (and it’s driver), memory tests and processor tests told us nothing except that the machines run slow on CHEAP motherboards and CHEAP processors with decent video cards and recent drivers.
yeah, who taught you to spoke???
Troll: C
Spelling and grammar: F
And you can`t even spell. Capitalism.
AMD processors are junk, and useless for CAD or 3D work, so an Intel processsor might be interesting. (Yeah, yeah, all of you gamers will cry, but facts are facts, AMD’s are junk for work)
——————–
When’s the last time you opened your eyes to AMD processors?
Capitolism RULES. Ever notice that those against Capitolism are the lazy, worthless, whiny sorts who don’t do or contribute anything?
——————–
Ever notice the ones boldly supporting capitalism only do so when there’s enough of everything to go round and the rest of the world’s problems aren’t given a second look in their land?
Ignorance is bliss (and I think you’ve proven it with that AMD statement..)
Well, this test seems ALOT more useful than most that I have seen. Its really no surprise that 2000 is a faster OS, but it would seem that XP is closer than I thought.I’m wondering why an Intel processor wasn’t used as a comparison as well. AMD processors are junk, and useless for CAD or 3D work, so an Intel processsor might be interesting. (Yeah, yeah, all of you gamers will cry, but facts are facts, AMD’s are junk for work)
Capitolism RULES. Ever notice that those against Capitolism are the lazy, worthless, whiny sorts who don’t do or contribute anything?
Excuse me, my mistake. Home has NTFS, Home does not have EFS. There’s so much missing in Home edition that I can’t always remember what’s left.
Most likely the partition you were trying to format was >32GB. Windows 2000/XP force NTFS on any partition larger than 32GB. You have to use a 9X boot or a third party app to keep the widely preferred FAT32.
[q]XP home doesn’t support NTFS. FAT32 all the way. XP Pro defaults to NTFS, though.[/q]
Eh?
When I did a fresh install of XP Home for a customer of mine it [b]only[/b] offered me the option of NTFS. I suppose if I would have formatted the drive before hand in FAT32, I could have kept it that way, but I didn’t and there really wasn’t a whole lot of need to do so.
I haven’t installed XP Pro on a unformatted hard drive, but I know that it offers both NTFS and FAT32 on a drive already formatted with FAT32.
XP home doesn’t support NTFS. FAT32 all the way. XP Pro defaults to NTFS, though.
I think that using NTFS for the Win2k and XP tests was fair, in a ‘best the os can do’ sense.. I don’t see much point in potentially throttling back the OS’es in the name of fairplay when it would just slant the tests…
(now, NTFS _AND_ FAT32 tests with Win2k/XP would have been valuable)
The only downside I really see to NTFS is when you hose your system, and can’t boot off a DOS disk to fix it — the “DOS-like” NTFS utilities from SysInternals are expensive! I keep my data partition formatted with FAT32 for the same reason… otherwise, I agree with you, dissonance.
“how can all those poor communist $50 average wage a month bastards afford a computer than can run xp? ”
They build ’em and stea…err pirate ’em too.
*[
Gerbil #152/153, comparos have shown that the NT-based OSes are generally faster with FAT32 than with any flavor of NTFS; this is because the more-sophisticated NTFS filesystem has more overhead than FAT32. The reason to use NTFS is better redundancy and security, though, which is often worth that overhead.
This is [i]not[/i] the reason dissonance’s ME scores were lower; it does raise the question about which file system should be used, however — is this a variable which should have been kept the same? IIRC the default W2K install is FAT32, with an option to convert to NTFS; dunno about XP…
Diss, what was your reasoning on this?
with all the privacy issues that XP has.. plus no real gain in buying it.. plus by buying you will be giving MS that they are doing the right thing..
DONT BUY IT !! stick with WIN2K unless you are a masoquist or an MS worshiper.
windows xp and windows 2000 used the nt file system wheres windows me used the fat32 file system so perhaps thats where the significant performance difference came from
windows 2000 and xp both used ntfs wheres win me used the older file system so win2000 and xp were bound to have a distinct advantage
[q]How many here visit MSN using something other than IE? [/q]
I actually use a shareware version of NetCaptor, before it became a 30 day trial… But I s’pose it works using the IE core…
Only a little bit slower than IE probably, but FAR more useful, and only 30 notes… go buy it now!
hehe I’m inciting rage against the IE machine, don’t I feel powerful,
IntelMole
I would like to see a performance test like this but also with Win98SE in it… WinME is in my opinion much slower than Win98SE… that would give you a good view how “old” OS’s are doing comparable with the new ones.
*[
Going on 150 comments, and no r{<* Duke Nuked *<}r yet... Something people seem to be forgetting here is that Joe Sixpack is probably too friggin' lazy to upgrade his OS; he'll get a new OS when he gets a new PC. That means that dissonance didn't really need to be concerned with a "real" low-end machine; he just needed to look at the low-end of what can be bought right now. Good article, dissonance, although a quick test or two to see what kind of performance hit Luna gives would have been nice.
Mustang – 1Ghz PIII on the slower Via Apollo Pro 133A, GeForce3, totally untweaked Win2k – 4800-5000 points in 3dmark2001. Something is HORRIBLY wrong with your systems.
xylker,
There are have been no “new” laws passed for ages(other than summary). They are all just expansions of existing laws(as I stated in 125 and 130).
And it is true that IP deserves compensation… I am no better a person when it comes to being greedy.. I want IP to continue it proliferation. So I can warez it all ;-))
But seriously, society is no better than it was in medieval times. instead of barons and kings screwing us we have government and the rich doing it. What do we get? The ends meat.
AG134, learn how to read(post 125)
Well, shit! XP just dumped 40 minutes of rant down the drain…
It said:
1. Bayer might not have acted ethically, but they are allowed to charge what the mkt. will bear.
2. IP deserves compensation, AG 125/Lao Tze and I may disagree as to the amount, but I think we can agree that it does deserve consideration (in the legal sense of the word)
3. Act responsibly for yourself, expect others to as well.
4. Laws make crimes by definition. Crimes can also cause new laws to be made/passed.
5. XP sucks! (changed from the original text)
/me
Enjoying the flame, good for winter and all.
Admittedly, I’ve not used XP yet, though I may install it on my fourth or fifth machine if I end up buying an OEM copy with my next HD or Mobo…which brings in another issue to happily gab about. What do you guys think on the state of grey market purchasing of equipment and OS?
Suffice it to say, I generally like the articles here and I tend to agree with most of the points TR makes. Like the Linux thing, I’m kind of lazy at home and I don’t want to work and learn something that will take time away from my game playing/programming (the programming I do on, suprise…Windows 2000).
Windows 98se doesn’t need to stay up for 1 year at a time…it only needs to run for four hours while I play whatever game I happen to be running. The complaint I have with Win98se is that it starts to die after 1 1/2 years for no reason I can find. If I wanted uptime I would probably have to vote for Netware 3.12 as I’ve seen 5 year uptimes on that OS. 😛 We are only getting to the point now where a machine running NT 4 could possibly have been running for 5 years straight, and even then I have to wonder if there can be any of those as we’ve had to set up automatic reboots weekly on our file servers so it doesn’t start choking on it’s memory leaks…
Is everyone really sucked in by money? I mean, yes, capitalism is based on growth by profit, but doesn’t it seem like there could be a better solution? I’m no Marxist but the guy did rip off some fairly intelligent people and that period of time was a good era of questioning the basic foundations that modern thought has laid down. I see it as this:
Capitalism can only exist when scarcity exists. Someone like Bin Laden really only has a chance of destroying Western Civs if he’s the one also making matter/energy/matter conversion processes work efficiently. I just hope that when that particular advance happens it happens in the U.S. and the transition doesn’t rip the culture apart…
My third .02
-Colin
*[
I was quite happy with WinXP… fast user switching is way cool, however when working in Excel XP, the thing is dog slow… I have a 400k workbook, and it takes forever to save changes…
I’ll put 2k back on, and test the speed increase..
btw, the machine is a 1.4 TBird, gig of CAS 2, 10k quantums on a 29160, GF3… Anything in Office should hardly break a sweat, funny thing too is that the ram usage peaked at like 180 megs… crazy, eh?
I liked the review, lots of pretty graphs 😉
we still run NT4 here at the office… only run office apps, on 550 K7’s w/256 megs..
EP
[q] 2. figure out how to get to 512MB with three DIMM’s? [/q]
Umm…heh….as you can see, i have my own rules for when apostrophes are justified.
Does that make me a relativist, Trident?
137, is it really that difficult to:
1. type all the letters in second person pronouns? (I’m not a officer of the grammar police, but that whole “u” thing annoys me even more than stray apostropes)
2. figure out how to get to 512MB with three DIMM’s?
(Yes, I’ve decided to make my tour d’idocy without help from Calvin’s transmogrification box. [b]Oh[/b], and props to Xylker for the dystopian lit references)
Ehh, 1x256MB + 2x128MB ???
Maybe you should clarify a bit.
I guess that you wonder why he
didnt use 2x256MB.
Am i right??
cheers
Well, looking at your first chart. I wonder what kind of memory u have used? Cuz 2×128=256 that i can understand, but for ur pro system u used 3 DIMMS and that made u 512Mb???
Somewhat surprised by these results. In our lab, we have Asus CUSL2, 1Ghz PIII’s running VisionTek GeForce3’s on Win2k. All of them score piss poor results in 3DMark2001, below 2000. I can pound that number at home on a similar system running Win98 with a Radeon DDR 64, scoring easily above 3000. Not quite the scores posted by the test systems, but still respectable for old technology.
But, move those GeForce’s over to a Dual 1.5 P4, and Win2k and the GeForce start shinning, scoring well into the 6000’s. Once you get all that overhead that the WinNT kernel comes with onto it’s own processor, things start smokin.
So bottom line is that this recomendation seems to only apply if you’re on an AMD platform. Intel has other issues with Windows systems that you may want to look at sometime. I have no plans to go to XP due to the overhead I’m seeing. Well, that and the fact that I don’t want to be M$’s little whipping post for registration every couple months when I upgrade.
Mustang
Sheya! Any software refresh is almost always accompanied by a hardware refresh in BIG BIZ corporate america, but do you really think that’s the norm? With business down in just about EVERY sector, you really think a majority of mid-range to small companies are going to authorize a hardware refresh just so they can get the “M$ latest n’ greatest”? Hell, you even think with the overall state of the economy that most BIG companies are gonna go for that? I can tell you it isn’t gonna happen here!
Some very interesting comments here… I particularly like the comment about “all intellectual rights and property should be free”… obviously that guy doesn’t earn a LIVING from the afformentioned property or he wouldn’t make such a dumb remark.
Anyhow… the company I work for (Oil and Gas, 3000 machines) will be upgrading to XP in 2002 Q2. Like most companies… any big OS refresh means a hardware refresh for us and the MINIMUM box will 1GHZ 256mb ram… so… I don’t see why all the whining about low-end machines. Any OS refresh on the enterprise scale almost always accompanies a hardware refresh.
I’m continually amazed at the lack of business acumen in many of these posts. MS is a business and their product is aimed at making profit… they KNOW that adoption of XP in the home market will only happen when XP is bundled with a new computer… so hardware isn’t an issue. MS also knows that businesses won’t adopt XP until they do their next hardware refresh… so… no issues with low-end machines there either.
For you geeks who hold onto their 266hmz machines cuz you are too cheap etc etc… MS doesn’t really market to you. They can’t make any money from you if you aren’t even interested in upgrading your machine.
like… DUH
AG #
Trident Troll, do you ever accept, or share/copy software (or music, or a book, etc) from your friends? Be honest.
Your ‘test’ on XP is fundamentally flawed …I hardly believe most businesses …hell, most PEOPLE, would consider a 800MHz machine a low-end system.
I would be willing to bet that the AVERAGE machine out there is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-3 years old, which would put it in the 300MHz category, with 32-64MB of RAM, and a couple of gigs drive space …and running Win98.
Run your tests on a machine like that and tell me how great XP is.
After all, Microsoft is trying to market XP to Joe/Jane Q. Public …and judging by the TV commercials …XP will have them soaring around — 20 ft. off the ground — the minute they install it.
NOT.
[q]The wonderful thing about relativism is that it allows one to internally justify any criminal act[q]
It’s odd how you omitted a perfectly good argument, but anyways…
If you were catching the nuances of what I was saying you would understand that “criminal acts” are not necessarily “immoral”. And immoral is the word of the day.
(Jaywalking is a crime but it is not immoral)
As I stated earlier, there are dangers to blindly accepting societies morals just because they are status quo. In a society that has become surfeited with money, the laws often reflect this obsession with mammon.
Religion was “invented” to bring law(morality) to the masses. We can see how quickly it was corrupted. Now we have the trustworthy government to tell us what is “moral”.
So I think I will coin my own definition:
Partisanism: A internal function which allows a person to unquestioningly follow the status quo. This function is extremely popular due to its ability to help the brain conserve energy.
/me is away: busy checking his yang for yins.
*[Originally Posted by Trident
Gah!!!
Dissonance shouldn’t have to defend his decisions here. What he presented forth is a set of data he obtained by doing legitimate tests. Don’t complain about the tests – Complain about the message they’re saying. And you know what? The message they’re saying is subjective. In other words, if you’ve got a problem with the way they turned out, then the problem lies with your interpretation of the data. There’s lots of pretty graphs to look at. You can make your own damn conclusions about what it means.
The problem with running an excellent site like TR is that you have limited resources. Anytime some big site like InfoWorld comes along and has the resources to conduct a much more thorough test, it casts doubt shadows across any who might disagree. I’m not trying to slander InfoWorld here, of course, but how seriously would you take their results if ZD had posted them?
I wish there had been some better low-end testing, but I appreciate the service that Dissonance *was* able to provide given his resources. Any of you flaming him for failing to provide you with what you wanted can just go conduct your own damn tests to figure it out. If you’re so smart, why are you bothering with listening to other people to come to the conclusions that you’ve already got fixed in your head?
For the record – 2K runs *SO* much better on my P166 laptop than Win98 does, amazingly enough. I can compile in Visual Studio while listening to MP3s and downloading/browsing the web, and nary a hiccup. I can’t even do my assembly work in 98 without it stalling. And on my Celery 466 and Athlon 900, it makes for a better gaming machine than 98 does, believe it or not. My Q3A framerates are usually about 5 fps higher in 2K…one machine has a Radeon AiW, and the other a GF2. If you think this is crazy talk, then you can go to hell because I know how my systems perform and I don’t need to answer to you.
I run XP on two machines now, both with Luna. And I happen to *like* the interface, thank you very much…but I will be giving it the old Resource Hacker 1-2. A house isn’t home until you rearrange the furniture. Honestly, I like the way XP is laid out a bit better, though I’ll admit that when I got OS X on my Cube, I got addicted to it. It’s got its faults, and needs a decent 3D card (and support…*cough* 10.1 *cough*) to make the dock animations look smooth, but it sure as hell is better thought out than Windows.
Back on track – I appreciated this article, as well as the ones at Anand and InfoWorld. I don’t think that Dissonance is misrepresenting anything here, and I think he did an excellent job.
There, no more anonimity for me…
now, now…
We all know that bolshevism and other forms Marxism don’t work. However there has to be a balance, I wasn’t being too terribly serious about the g{
Heh, don’t laff #56, my p200/64M does very well with 98se but 98lite’d. Only thing that lags on occasion is contextual submenus and file renaming.
Also, I can count the # of times on one hand it has locked up OS-wise in the past year (knock on wood).
Then again, I know what I am doing, so that is FWIW.
In summation: “What EVER!”
————-
Hah, so you’re saying I don’t what I’m doing? LOL. Quite the contrary, 9x fanboy.
How long can your 98 wonder machine stay up? Weeks at a time, or constant reboots? How many hours of heavy use can it tolerate before the resources vanish and it loses its blistering speed? 98lite does not give it a new kernel, sorry. And now much does it slow down when running CAD apps, Photoshop, dreamweaver, and web browsers for hours?
I’ve made my choice…
Oh my goodness. I haven’t had this much fun reading comments in a long time. From Win9x preaching to justifing warez…..it just doesn’t get any better then this.
Although I did learn a few things from all of this:
1.) Quite a few people here think that TR has a large amount of resources (time, money, etc.) to devote to pleasing the masses.
2.) Gerbil bashers are studs. (I have my gerbil shirt, do you?)
3.) Forge has never stolen a porsche (or at least he isn’t admitting it).
4.) A Duron 800 w/ 256MB RAM and a GeForece 2MX isn’t condidered low end.
5.) Windows users like to defend their OS choice just as *nix users and Mac users.
Note: Sarcasm, irony, and other forms of humor at work. I would’ve thought of some satire but I’m too lazy. 🙂
Since it seems to be some sort of pressing issue with you, this is my replacement for television
———-
TV sucks. Most of it is Lowest Common Denominator garbage. I’m with you on this one.
Ooooh yeah, this is gettin good now
WinME is so %#$& ing worthless and boring. Like a intoxicated walk over an overflowing Detroit sewer at night, I could just puke and never think about it again.
ARRRRGH….
Done.
There you have it.
AG110 – As to the Bayer comment, when was the last time you tried to take a medication from your lab to animal trials through human trials Phase I thru Phase IV, then market and manufacture it? Would you like r{
Xylker, the Latin’s just icing — it’s the basic statement I agree with. 😉
[q]Intellectual property and information should be free for all! [/q]
OK, come to work tomorrow for free. Thank you in advance.
IP is the ONLY thing that you can create without any capital. Why do you think that “street people” sing and dance? ‘Cuz they’re SO frickin’ happy to be on the street? No, because it takes no capital to start earning money/food while you are on the street.
#110
“Intellectual property and information should be free for all!”
What a great thought! Not….
Lets see, the problem with that is that why would anyone bother to come up with new IP if its just going to be “free for everyone”? Face facts, profit motivates the world, socialism DOESNT WORK. People will not work as hard “for the general welfare” as they will for their own….
Aww, Two-Fer you just fell in love with the Latin… (WRT AG104)
The whole issue of IP is clouded by the portability of it; “possession is 9/10th’s of the law” suddenly becomes 10/10th’s of the law. If I have it, I can claim that it is “mine” because IT is just digital bits on a hard drive. Those digital bits are very easily cloned, very easily transported, and if reassembled in order they make (remake) an item of value.
Rights management will become a (the?) new profession, there will be RM Lawyers, and RM clearinghouses, and your “right” to IP will be tied to a physical device or will be biometrically attached to “you.” Aldous and George, I am scared…
I don’t know about you.. but those scores look fishy to me!!!
I’ve never gotten better 3DMark in Win2k compared to WinMe/98.
These benchmarked are surely rigged in an attempt to persuade us to buy Windows XP. There is no way (from personal experience) that anything would run faster on XP.
GERBAL WAR
FIGHT!
g{http://www4.tomshardware.com/graphic/01q4/011107/radeon-04.html<]§
He was using XP and 98 SE to test Gf3 and Radeon 8500. It was consistently faster under SE.
Since I have SE, I will be keeping it for games. I might dual boot win2000, but feel no need to buy into MS's new leasing model for software. Win2000 pro can be had for a better price than XP pro.
I think its clear that you need 98 to support older games anyway, then you must decide which NT kernal OS best meets other needs. XP home is really gutted with a large chunk of real functionality removed. XP pro vrs 2000 pro is very similar except for more fluff and less bug fixes in xp pro. That plus activation agravation and a higher price.
Win 2000 seems like the clear way to go to me.
AG
Transman88 – You can remember a login and password for your Hotmail, and one for your Mac card, and one for just about everything else in the world, but asking you to remember one for TR is just too much to ask? I don’t get it. I know there are quite a few regulars who follow the same philosophy, but I can’t imagine why someone who does comment regularly would not register! It’s like an open invitation for someone to defame you! It’s like giving out your social security number. It makes it a matter of trivial difficulty for anyone to impersonate you. I like the login system because it gives me a recognizable face; others know it’s me. It also makes it just a little bit more challenging for someone else to make me look like an ass. I just don’t get it.
AG #110 – Not sure how to respond to that. I’m just a dirty SOB who warezes because I’m cheap and lazy. I never got into the philosophy of it, much.
Actually I am not done my ranting from AG110 yet(sorry)
[quote]Ah, mine eyes have been opened…
I’m gonna go steal a porsche off the dealer lot tonight.
I can’t afford to by one, so why not just ‘warez’ it? [/quote]
Trident, There is a huge difference:
-A car dealer actually loses money!(And its insurer)
-A software company doesnt lose money out of its pockets, only the r{
I get the feeling that warez-hounds like myself are being shunned. But it is time for people to start thinking!
b{
So cool, MS has made it easy for everyone to make copies of WinXP, unless they’honest, at which point they have to use the product activation code. Go, team, go!
[q]You weirdos that post 5-6 times a day *might* want to look into calling Miss Cleo and seeing what she can tell you about your life…[/q] Since it seems to be some sort of pressing issue with you, this is my replacement for television — I haven’t even have one hooked up for a decade or so — and it doesn’t eat up nearly the time most of my friends lose to the boobtube. And I can easily post on occasion during my workday, since that time is already spent on the computer with a 7//24 connection.
See? Not so bad as you thought… and BTW, cookies manage the login for me, and registration is a small price to pay for a face — which goes a long way with me when it comes to respect. Shouting insults from behind the mask on anynomity, OTOH, doesn’t mean much at all… not much that’s good, anyway.
Gerbil #104 is a standout who really should register, though! 🙂
Dissonance, that sounds like a plan to me! I think more than just OfficeXP is at work, though…
BTW, my post was to answer the question you indirectly asked — why were the InfoWorld results different from yours? You hadn’t mentioned what I suspect are reasons much more basic than just memory (which the IW tester has now stated was 256MB in all cases).
*[
*[
The nice thing about faux objectivism is that it allows one to justify almost any convenient act, as long as you are the one who controls the allegedly objective authority 🙂
If the RIAA (or anyone) paid enough congresspeople enough money to make it a federal crime to lend my CDs to my friends, I would still lend my CDs to my friends. There is a big difference between mala in se and mala prohibida crimes — and delaring an action mala prohibida does not necessarily make it mala in se. In fact, the danger of making too many actions mala prohibida is that it undermines respect for the law across the board.
As for licensing, the legal basis for the enforceabilty of licenses traditionally was a fictional bargain between two willing parties of equal power. Unfortunately, last I checked, MS wasn’t returning my calls, so the reality is MS’s take-it-or-leave-it offer, backed up by laws passed by what appears to be a captive legislature. While Congress has done a good job implementing laws that benefit MS and other large corporations, you’ll have to foprghiuve me if I believe they’ve done a not-so-good job of looking out for my (or any other consumer’s) interests when it comes to IP issues. Hence the civil disobedience.
That is not to claim that any or all manners of civil disobedience are justified – I’m not going to run out and warez every MS product ever made and ship them by the 1000s to people in New Jersey. I will, however, scour the net for the activation crack (or a non-authenticating copy) after I buy XP. And I will install it on both of my machines at home. That’s what I think would be a reasonable use of an OS, and in the absence of a legal regime that seems to take into account my views, I’m going to play by my rules. And yes, if everybody makes up their own rules, we have anarchy and uncertainty. Which leads me back to why a captive legislature is a bad deal for everyone, not just the consumer.
damn, this went on – sorry.
[q]The licenses are legal[/q]Talk about ignorant gerbils babbling…
The Microsoft EULA has never been held up in court, and only a single (and ultimately doubtful) decision has upheld “shrinkwrap licensing” in general. Most courts have laughed it out of the courtroom. No one knows if shrinkwrap licenses are legal or not — that’s part of what the fuss over the UCITA: it makes them legal by legislation. And that’s one of the reasons that law is being fought so heavily, by so many groups.
Listen, just to wrap things up here if you are killed by a deranged monkey with an ice-pick or if you die of a heart attack while eating dinner you are still dead right? So what if Windows XP runs a little slower or faster if you are going to die someday just enjoy the damned view!
Dissonance says… [q]Correct me if I’m wrong, but that looks to be a realistic simulation of a business environment with multiple tasks running.[/q]”Realistic?” Maybe… at least that’s the word BAPCo used. Yeah, SysMark 2001 [i]does[/i] have a bit of multitasking built in — but not a lot. Compare your BAPCo quote with what InfoWorld did (quoting from the sidebar at §[<http://www.infoworld.com/articles/tc/xml/01/10/29/011029tcwinxp.xml<]§ ):[q]To determine a baseline for testing, we ran the OfficeBench 3.0 test script -- roughly equivalent to BAPCo's SysMark -- in a five-iteration loop with no additional load... For our first multitasking scenario, we used the same OfficeBench script running in parallel with a single instance of the Database, Multimedia and Workflow load simulators. Each simulation used an underdemanding workload: 50 records per database transaction, one Windows Media clip, and one MAPI (Messaging API) folder object with just under 5MB of mixed message and attachment data, respectively. Scenario 2 used three concurrent instances of each load simulator. The workload was increased to 150 database records and three different MAPI folder objects. Finally, scenario 3 executed five concurrent instances of the load simulators, and increased the workload to 250 records per database transaction and five MAPI folder objects totaling almost 25MB of data.[/q]So you're right that there was some multitasking going on -- as realistic as SysMark is, with whatever proprietary mix they use -- but the InfoWorld testing was much more heavily multitasked, in four increasing-load scenarios. SysMark's multitasking pales next to what IW did... Dissonance, I'm not trying to bust your chops. I'm just pointing out that the two tests were worlds apart, and the results dont disagree that much: when you account for the fact that you ran with System Restore disabled, with more capable machines, with more memory in the high-end systems, and with a lighter multitasking workload, the outcome isn't inconsistent... The InfoWorld tests show XP and W2K are about tied in a light workload (you used Office 2K, they used Office XP, which makes a difference also); with added multitasking, XP falls off, and with heavy multitasking it profoundly sucks. And from my experiences in the business world, what IW did isn't far off the mark: the biz world useage is far to complex to sum up in a single test, and their multiple scenarios cover a decent range. I trust those results. Go read their test results carefully, diss -- I think you'll agree.
Sorry, should be lens, singular not plural.
The beauty of relativism is that at least you can admit what lense you see the world through.
The beauty of criminal acts is that their definitions are created by money and defined by people that are a law unto themselves.
93, you have a good point there.
92 Gravon:
I’ll agree with your piracy argument IF the Company is using their copyright to harm you, the purchaser. However, since I don’t play movies, not even on my PC, I’m not qualified to judge the merits of your argument.
Regarding “WPA” I am qualified to judge that.
Bill Gates can fry in h—- before I’ll let him “snoop” (via WindowsXP) around in my PC. No way. Never. I’ll stick with 98 or go W2K (or even Linux, if ms keeps pushing wpa)).
ooo, lookie, another ignorant gerbil babbling and buying anti ms sentiments. At least there were some /. ers with their heads clear when the fiasco with MSN occured, how come nobody seemed to have picked up their comments hmm?
[q]if remeber less then a month ago users of other browsers could not access MSN.com which is in violation of the World Wide Consortium[/q]
There is absolutely no rule within the WWW that states one must allow every browser to access one’s site, and it is not a binding law.
[q]not to mention violating Im sure at least a few anti-trust laws[/q]
If Dissonance decided he don’t want anyone that uses Opera to browse his site, he reserves full right to do so. How many here visit MSN using something other than IE?
[q]And recently I have heared that the FCC will enforce the MS license in the business. Its time for the money hungry giant to let it go[/q]
The licenses are legal, and every big piece of software you have ever gotten off the shelves comes with similar license agreements.
lol, I hear you Dissonance about not having any budget stuff to use, but howz about next time you give away some of that hardware, you throw it in my direction? 😉
For the record, I run a K6-2 350@400, which I consider below budget 🙂 Around 700 would be budget now I think…
Oh, and upon reading that article a while back that you put a link in shortbread to, which slammed the p4 badly… I remember coming across a little thing somewhere about the compiling of OSes…
As I understood it, any OS is designed for processors that are 1-2 years older than it… i,e Win98 is designed for ’96 processors…
So, if you was to run XP on its minimum system specs (pretty close to mine if I remember actually, 350MHz, 128 MB RAM, etc. etc.), and then run the others on the same spec, I’m wondering if Win2k and WinME would come out in a better light…
(Dissonance, I would be glad to send you my system for a “replacement” system hehe)
Just a thought or two,
IntelMole
*[Originally Posted by Trident
The ton of Posts in this thread seem to sum up to this.
“For minimum hassle, do this”:
W98 …. Homeowners / Gamers.
W2K …. Business.
How do you protect peoples’ ideas so they’ll come up with more of them? How do you reward them for those ideas so your culture will remain dominant? One distinction I’d like to make is that very few individuals actually own the patents or copyrights that generate money. The broad majority are owned by companies, and the majority of those are owned by 10 really big companies. Our copyright law is not the same as it used to be and it doesn’t protect the rights of the original owners. An example of this would be when Disney extended the copyright falloff period so it could keep Mickey. There’s a reason why copyrights and patents are not around forever, as after a certain point it harms the culture for ideas to be kept in seclusion (that’s why there is a public domain). The transference of copyright from individuals (which is what the system was designed to protect) to companies has also created a negative shift in the value of the property itself.
Again with the XP, Microsoft’s plan will fail. I don’t want to pay 3 cents a minute for the ability to use my computer. I don’t want them rifling through my emails to see if I’m using a competitor’s product. I certainly don’t want all the things I put on Passport servers to become part of Microsoft’s copyright portfolio. I have not bought XP at this point, and if I did I would have no problem with removing the WPA out of it. If they want to come at me with copyright violations (under the aggregious and anti-consumer DMCA) I’ll return the favor under fair-use and unfair trade practices. My product, my computer, stay the hell away.
I am not sure what the answer is to the copyright dilemma in a general sense. I have no problem paying for software, fair enough, but I will definitely speak with my dollars if a company thinks it has the audacity of trying to own me. I won’t let some random executive dictate to me how I can use the stuff I paid for. I don’t care if other people are stealing from that company, it’s how they treat me that matters. The Macrovision protection scheme of DVD’s pissed me off to no end; my TV had only cable input (it was a JVC 25″ if you care :P), and DVD players as far as I know do not have cable out so I tried to pipe through the VCR…guess what, Macrovision dark/light affect. At that point I had no problem with DVD piracy (ironically, I would have been able to watch the movies fine had I pirated them). I downloaded DeCSS within a day and made a copy on CD just in case the US courts decided to wreck free speech. The moment copy protection schemes harm me as an honest/legal consumer is the moment I want to harm the company back. This WPA is something I’ll have to see firsthand, but I can say that I may be using Linux sooner than I think.
I’m actually not meaning to troll here, new to the forum (been reading for over a year though) and still not sure where to put stuff.
-Colin
“Low end” = 800 MHz + 256MB? You tech enthusiasts are really out of touch with the real world. At the shop where I work, the “low end” machines are P166 systems with 96MB memory, on which we *do* run Windows 2000. Windows XP on these DOES suffer in a big, big way and there are no plans (no matter how much some of us would like to see them) to replace 300+ of these desktop systems with brand new machines.
I’m just pissed that MS seems to be astroturfing again. Six different people have joined the #linux channel on my favorite IRC server and spontaneously started spouting off about how wonderful XP is. When quizzed as to why they would join an obviously unreceptive channel and start singing, they all clammed up and split. One guy seemed to realize what he was doing, and apologized before parting.
I wonder how many of these people were gifted with copies of XP in exchange for their evangelism?
Why is is that there are so many bogus scams going on about XP ? One site says its great and yet another shows benchmarks that show XP being slower all the way around when compared to Win2k. It is all getting to be a bit of “who’s telling the truth” and besides what about all the BS stuff about it registering product numbers with MS ? Whats true ? I dont know, but I know this. I will be using Linux as my primary OS ( actually have been for some time) MS has tried to force users to use there browser – if remeber less then a month ago users of other browsers could not access MSN.com which is in violation of the World Wide Consortium – not to mention violating Im sure at least a few anti-trust laws. And recently I have heared that the FCC will enforce the MS license in the business. Its time for the money hungry giant to let it go. For those that say they have the power – remember this – it is only when such power is exerted and a corporation tries to push their realm on others that there is a noticeably threat to that very corporations business – meaning – MS is getting scared . period
I warezed a Porsche once!
No, not really. 🙂
*[Originally Posted by Trident
*[Originally Posted by Trident
*[http://www.bapco.com/sysmark2001press.htm<]§
Correct me if I\'m wrong, but that looks to be a realistic simulation of a business environment with multiple tasks running.
Why yes, yes I do have some insight.
My insight is that you shouldn’t go around asking Anons questions as if they’re someone indentifiable. They’re not.
I suggest I register a new account so that someone doesn’t impersonate me, then we can talk.
Randall Kennedy (#80), as InfoWorld Test Director do you have any specific insights into the differences between the IW tests and the ones here? TIA…
*[
98 se, when finally configured( tweaked), is as close as u need. me just ain’t an improvement, and xp is too new. i’d wait for sp2 or three, b4 doin any comparisons. my rant, is resources. why are we still dealin w/that? anybody want my me cd for free? it’s a clock right now…
Regarding the InfoWorld Testing:
For the record, we tested both OS with 256MB of RAM – PC800 on the P4 and PIII-Dual boxes, and PC/133 CL2 (Micron 2-2-2) on the uniprocessor PIII config.
RCK (Test Director for the Project)
Oh God. I fried up one of my AthlonMPs yesterday, and am stuck on a Duron 750 while I save my pennies. XP just went from sluggish to worthless.
Even with all the GUI crap disabled (angryfruitsalad.dll), it’s still quite noticably slower than it was on the MPs.
Hey Colin – Sounds liek you and I had almost the same last easy install, though mine was a 366A. Had the same upgrade nightmare on BP6, followed by a nasty Tiger 133, followed by a beautiful time with an Asus P2B-D. Sold that because it worked too well. Been running Athlons ever since… Well, up till yesterday. Know where I can get a BP6 cheap?
I’m #70, finally got around to setting up the account.
I agree with indeego, where I work we haven’t even started dumping W2k on the desktops yet. Our testbed runs Win2k but our desktops will probably not be moved until Q3 of next year. Business use is a different animal than home use though. I think the part that really changes the dynamic is that “rock solid” means 1 year uptimes. An Enterprise running something like Novadigm or Radia doesn’t ever want IS staff touching the machines after they’ve been installed, it’s a waste of money. I find it ironic when someone like Ace’s runs a machine for a day or two looping timedemos and calls it “rock solid”. I do not hate Win2k, actually it will make my business life much easier, but I have different expectations for my home use. I do enough office stuff in the office, at home I want to play video games. I don’t care how fast a game runs unless I can notice the speed (i.e. it’s dog slow) or it doesn’t work right. Maybe Windows 2000 isn’t to blame for my troubles (yes I buy shrink wrap software, I have enough problems without letting Scr1pt K1Dd13Z modify my stuff before I see it), maybe it’s shoddy hardware drivers or DirectX 7-8 incompatiblitiers, but when you tally it up it doesn’t make a difference. The stuff works fine in 98se and doesn’t work in Win2k, game over.
-Colin Gravon
[q] Is that a record for short lifespan anyone? [/q]
By no means is W2K out to pasture. Any corporate (By corporate I mean enterprise,) entity that rolls out XP would be foolish. I think the smaller the shop the better idea it makes. Everyone should wait for the first few SP’s. Early reports are it’s playing havoc with Active Directory and group policy objects, it’s network is chatty and will need to be severely tweaked, and the driver availability is lacking, as well as a reliatively untested security record. (as expected.)
and of course there is no server line under XP yet.
So W2K will be the standard in the corp world for a few more years, I’d estimate… My self heading a 60 head shop, won’t be putting it on anyone’s desktop for 2 years, at least. Standard policy for MS OS’s to wait for fallouts from SP2… (NT4 taught us a very big lesson… 🙂 )
Diss said in the article:[q]It’s difficult to say why InfoWorld’s results were so different; one possible suspect is not enough RAM, but that’s difficult to verify since they didn’t reveal how much memory was in their test systems.[/q]While it’s true they didn’t specify memory size, I think that’s far from the only probably reason for the differences. If you didn’t pick up on the rest, I suspect you didn’t closely read the InfoWeek article.
One: they ran only Intel processors (1.5GHz P4 for the “high end”, 733MHz PIII for the “low end”, and the dual 1GHz PIII box for SMP) because they were investigating typical business use. But for the duallie box, both of their systems were substantially weaker than diss’s setups, and it’s well-known that AMD’s processors do a much better job than Intel’s at running Microsoft-compiled apps (which is generally the default, especially with Microsoft applications).
Two: they did not turn off the System Restore utility in XP for the baseline tests, while diss did. This alone makes the test configurations different. When they turned off some of the eyecandy (System Restore in XP, font smoothing and UI animation in both OSes), the performance delta was hugely smaller — as expected, and as dissonance showed.
Three: they ran versions of Office, because they were investigating typical business use. But that’s not all they did: they also ran some benches which consisted of a “mix of business productivity and client-server tasks that simulate a broad range of potential end-user scenarios”. The IW sidebar makes this very clear, as does the article itself.
Four (and most important, IMHO): they ran a baseline set of tests (OfficeBench, which they call “roughly equivalent to BAPCo’s SysMark) which were like [i]all[/i] diss’s tests — [/i]i.e.,[/i] basically one app at a time — and found XP to be somewhat slower than W2K (as it often was in diss’s tests). Then they ran three levels of increasingly-higher multitasking, loading an increasing number of database, multimedia and workflow load simulators on top of the baseline OfficeBench set; they did this to simulate a common office situation, where a single computer is being used for routine office work while it’s running things like database searches and email in the background.
[b]It was the multitasking scenarios which showed the large XP slowdowns, and diss didn’t test anything like this![/b]
That’s where your differences are — and they are clearly stated in the InfoWorld article. Dissonance tested like a gamer, InfoWorld tested like a heavy business user… no mystery at all.
You might have the “Open License” version. It doesn’t have any product activation. It only asks for a key like the old style.
“In my opinion, it’s pretty pointless to compare OSes when you start turning off a lot of things that make them unique”
important distinction. are you benchmarking the OS, or the window manager. the difference is more visible in linux, but even in windows, many versions let you choose the shell software. if you care about the kernel’s power, any gui features are just interference. Turn them all off, and compare what the system can really handle. Here, I expect XP would shine even more.
“Also, most of the folks here run AMD anyway”
“it makes sense to run ME”
“I would bet that most people still run their desktops w/o any tweaking”
different poster on the 3rd, but shows an important need to pick an audience. either run out of the box, g{
#70
Wow. That sounds bad but that just has not been my experience. I also am a system admin and for years I said that NT was the only MS OS I had any respect for. I was sceptical before jumping in to 2000 but aside from early incompatibilities, it is by far the best Windows OS I have worked with (Accounting machines, programming machines, dually servers, dually CAD workstattions). In my opinion, Microsoft did accomplish a hybrid of NT’s stability and 9x’s ease of installation/troubleshooting.
PLEASE, don’t tell Microsoft I said those nice things about them. I am just dissapointed that after NT 4.0’s LONG life, 2000 has already been put out to pasture. Is that a record for short lifespan anyone?
I think they should do another comparison onces drivers mature for winxp because it is still fairly new. Ive run win98, win2k andn winxp in that order and all have been fairly stable for me but i have to say that 2k and up are the most stable. I also noticed that xp was the fastest of the 3 for me and as for tweaking, i turn off all the services i dont need/want which cuts down its memory quite a bit.
Btw…
Obviously, Win2k and WinXP are better than Win9x-anything. That’s not the point. I don’t expect Win98SE to beat either of them or even match either of them… Not a chance.
However, all that being said, I still believe – based on personal experience on a couple of different systems – that Win98SE is far more stable and efficient than WinME.
I realize that WinME is the “most recent” version of Win9x, and that logically it “should” be the best, but the cold hard truth is that it’s not. It’s slower, more unstable (not that any Win9x is “stable”) and has less driver support.
In conclusion, I don’t think any of us are suggesting that trying out Win98SE will suddenly turn the tables and pull out a victory against the evil 2k and XP team, but I *do* think that you’ll see a difference in perfomance, and I *do* think that difference is significant enough to note in any comparison between them.
Oh, and I personally run Win2k =)
In reading the posts, I think that people must just have better luck with software/hardware than I do. In my own experience (i.e. the only one that matters to me) the NT core has caused me more headaches any other. At work I administer NT/2000 on integrated Compaq pcs and it’s not had any troubles, but I install it at home and the wonders begin. I’ll take a perfectly working Athlon/Duron B system that has 98se, format it and re-install with Windows 2000…bam..suddenly I’m in for days of compatibility testing.
The perfomance numbers I’ve read in the last year put 98 and 2k neck and neck, with 98 leading until the 2k drivers matured. My experience has been that it doesn’t matter how well 2k runs because it’ll have flaky bugs that ruin your gaming eXPerience. For example, Dark Age of Camelot chokes out and dies for no reason…and yes I’ve tried Ati, Geforce2/3, Kyro II, and even a Voodoo3, but no luck. I’ve got SiS730 integrated boards because I was sick of fighting with crappy Win2k network drivers, and my older machines are running KT7-RAID or the 266-SDR Epox board. That’s not all, good luck getting Unreal Tournament working on your pc with Win2k, the only luck I had with that was my Voodoo3 (woop), and yes I’ve used the primary three recent Detonater drivers. Yes I’ve installed the AMD Win2k compat patch, yes I’ve installed the VIA4in1 drivers, yes I’ve installed the friggin patch for Soundblaster Live, DirectX 8.1a? got it. Have I installed SP2? yes. blah blah blah. If you are benchmarking without spending ten days straight making the NT kernal function correctly than you aren’t representing real world scenarios and therefore the data you are gathering is not going to accurately reflect the nightmare.
I spent 8 months trying to live with Win2k on the gaming side. After re-installing over and over, replacing the DVD drive with a Kenwood 52 spd CD, changing video cards times, moving motherboards something like 11 times, getting integrated network/sound and buying new cases/mice/keyboards I realized that Win2k wasn’t worth the headache. I then added a second hard drive to my machine and set up dual boot with 98SE (does anyone else remember hearing all the sites talk about how much of a dog WinME was? Why would you want to install that?) and Win2k. At least I can play Unreal without trying to figure out if DirectPlay is to blame, or whether or not the compatibility mode or driverset isn’t working right.
If WinXP is anything like Win2k than I’ll play the waiting game on it because for home use Win2k was a POS.
As an aside, I’d like to mention that the easiest time I had was with Mandrake 8. I wish Linux would mature faster and get DaOC so I could switch over to that. Of course, if my personal eXPerience is unique then I’d probably end up having to recompile the kernal with the special -Colin switch to make it work right, who knows.
Oh yeah, by the way, Intel’s platform is not any better. The last easy setup/install I had at home was my BH6/Celeron 300. After that I ran into Flip chip problems with BP6, a bad Tyan Dual board, BX6 rev 2 cap failure, south bridge heat problems on the BE6, and i810/i815e chipset/agp hell.
-Colin Gravon
With all due respect, I’d like to throw in my suggestion (along with the others) that you try this little matchup again using Win98SE instead of WinME. I have found 98SE to be MUCH more stable and generally much faster all around than WinME.
The difference is very noticable in gaming.
Trident Troll: I pay for software too. Just not MS Software. Then again, the only installation of Windows around here is on my fianc
[q]Had we run 98, people would have bitched that we didn’t run ME because it’s “newer” [/q]
I don’t think visitors to this site, who are mostly enthusiasts, would agree with that. Most enthusists recognize the nightmare of ME versus 98SE, and consider ME a downgrade from 98SE.
I have a friend that works at Dell’s tech support site in Beaverton, Oregon. He stated that their operating costs for ME are [i]higher[/i] than for 98SE. More per capita tickets are opened, it takes longer to support a call, and driver support is actually worse than under 98SE. Even with the restore “features” of ME. This is not just any “support center,” either. Dell is [b]very very[/b] stringent about cost control for their support centers. They recently moved a lot of their support all the way to India because of the labor cost savings…
*[http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1544&p=14<]§
*[
*[
I wonder how the results would be if they used a defrag utility to move the benchmarks/game executables to the beginning of the driveg{…
i agree with AG#59, who here doesn’t tweak the hell out of your OS? i couldn’t give a crap how fast the default install is.
problem is, we all tweak differently so its pretty hard to benchmark that. my 98se is so tweaked i think its on meth. get it? har har.
AG #36: i didn
all I can say is that if you can’t do more than attribute driver problems the cause of an “anomoly” like a high end processor running faster than a low end processor, then I have a hard time trusting anything you say.
Running unaltered OS’s will almost always favor the more recent version. A lot has been done to understand how to speed up 98, and many drivers are optimized for specific settings. Yeah, tweak the hell out of both of them, with equally skilled tweakers, and bench that. Far more applicable to what a gamer would experience, at least.
Pay for software!!! You have to be kidding me! Got 4200 mp3’s, never paid for an OS in my life, probably 100,000$ worth of warez sitting around. Who in there right mind would feel guilty for screwing Billy Gates out of a couple bucks. Oh wait…. He’s the second richest man in the world right now… I feel real guilty! ;-))
ag#48 here… so fixing a flaw with winme and 512 megs of ram is the same as overclocking your vided card? You do know that without makeing the vcache change winme will crash/run WAY slow and generaly run like hell? If you cant even allow a simple change to fix a problem then just take 256 out for the winme test and watch it run hella better.
AG #36: i didn
#48
If they were to change all those settings it would seem to be the software equivalent of overclocking. In a cpu test you compare out of box processors the way they were designed to be run (not overclocked by tweaking busspeed and voltage and clock multipliers and super coolers). So, with software, you should try to test it as it is sold and installs. If you change those settings, then you need to add another spot in each of your graphs for a “Tweaked 9x box” (and perhaps another for a “Tweaked NT box”)
§[<http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/01q4/011107/radeon-03.html<]§ this one surprised even me for 98 vs xp
#50
Oooooooooh. Yes, it’s a conspiracy.
*[
p4 over athlon? heh
there’s better performance to be had with a P4 and XP, some ppl like to hide the truth.
*[Originally Posted by Trident
There is has to be something wrong with that winme install, something was not configured correctly. Did you set the vcache settings so winme can properly handle the 512megs of ram you had in the highend computer? (add ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 to the 386enh in the system.ini, and change MaxFileCache to equal 262144 under vcache again in the system.ini).
Hell on my box (tbird 1.2,Iwill KK266,256pc 133,seagate Barracuda IV 40gig,Visiontek gf3 ti200, all latest drivers/chipset drivers installed in win98) I get 5500 in 3dmark2001, your box is better and scores less?? In xp I get about the same as 98(heh don
*[
If XP is faster….why the hell does it seem b{
Don’t compare Office to Windows.
Office XP is not very good. Office 2000 is barely better. Both are slow and cludgy in a way analogous to Win98.
Win2k is nothing like Office or 98.
If the world used WordPerfect, we’d all be a lot happier 🙂
#42, you sir, have fallen into the trap of
MARKETING
The AlthonXP is fast as smeg no matter what it’s running, don’t think that AXP + WXP = faster
I will have to throw in my agreement that the Duron system was not indicative of low end.
I am a full time programmer and in the office I have a 600Mhz laptop and a 233 Pentium MMX! The 233 might well be the slowest here (I keep it working and do not want to spend the time migrating years of work over yet) but there are quite a few that are not even close to the Duron system. My 233 does fine with 9x running internet explorer, office, and various programming packages specialized for robotics and automation, not the newest games or multimedia. To me, a computer in the 300-400 range should have been chosen as a typical “low-end” pc while the Duron should have been “Mid Range”.
One more thing, According to the XP label, 233 MHz is required, at least 300 is recommended.
Next up would be comparison with the Athlon XP and Windows XP together in a Via 266 board. I would be willing to bet that Win XP would be beter on performance ising one of the newer processors, being that the Athlon XP CPU is supposed to show added performance in Win XP…
Osiris
Actaully, a good reason to stay with 9x for now are the radeon 8500 drivers, which for the 2k/xp core are still in their infancy, and work relatively well, if not as fast as they should, in 98.
Yes, the 2k/xp kernel is faster, more stable, and has better memory management. However, the actual implementation of that is often crap. I use 2k at the office, for typical office crap. On a p3-600 w/256 ram, it’s sluggish as hell, has memory problems up the wazoo (especially when running IE, yick), and just chokes with more than 5-6 netscape windows open. Same specs on a 98 system at home and I can run far more with little to no slowdown and none of the “no i won’t let you restore that window!” crap. Basically, if I could run the windows core, with a stripped down window manager, I’d be fine with it.
Yes, at some point, 98 will be completely dropped from support, as is happening to 95 now, and has been for a year or so. By then, I will either suck up and install a later version of windows, or go where I go for all my real work. Linux. Wine and WineX aren’t there yet, but making some great headway, and the performance is typically better than windows.
I’m mainly convinced most people who complain endlessly about 98 don’t know how to run a machine. The right portions of the OS disabled, virtually nothing memory resident, it runs as stably as my 2k box at work, with drastically more speed. The only box I can’t get stable is my 95 box (it’s runs AIM, ICQ, and a web browser), but that’s hardware, it crashes in any OS i run.
-tk
AG #36: i didn
*[http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1505<]§
“We are in a recession you know! ”
You’re only in a recession if you think you’re in a recession.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not in a recession. Cheap ram = me buying more ram.
A Duron ANYTHING is NOT low-end. As of Today, the 8th of November, 2001, a low-end system would be something like a PII400 on a BX chipset with ATI-something video and 128mb or even 64mb of ram.
One thing I do agree with is that a Duron 850 isn’t “low end”. Most of corporate America is still running Pent IIs and Celerons. A Duron 850 is as fast or faster than just about anything you’ll see outside of the datacenter. At work, I have a P3 700 and everyone is jealous of how fast it is. At home I still run dual celerons at 488 (but ordered a Tiger MP and morgan core durons last night!). I think you should have tested on a P3 600 or somewhere threreabouts.
Using less Ram would have also been more interesting. Ram may be cheap, but that doesn’t mean folks are going to buy more. We are in a recession you know!
Windowmaker is cool. Luna isn’t.
The game speed different between 9x and 2k is minor.
XP can be made to fucntion however you want. You people think inside the box, if you’d ever used 2k before, you’d know that you can turn off just about everything under the sun. XP is the same way. Don’t like the XP interface? Great, me too… and I use XP. Yet it looks just like 2k. Funny how that works, huh? An OS that isn’t a piece of aged crap?
Trust me, the 2k kernal is far superior. If you’re worried about games, then that’s an even better reason to upgrade to XP or 2k.
Nvidia’s drivers are easily at the point now whee they work at LEAST as well on 2k as 9x.
Anyone who is happy with 9x and really doesn’t want to listen to reason and switch, good for you. Stick with 9x for all any of us care. If it makes you happy, keep doing it. But be aware that a TOTALLY different OS codebase is available for use. If you’re worried about drivers, then worry about 9x. Driver development for 9x is scaling back, XP is scaling forward.
Enjoy 9x while you can, if you really want to. But be aware that at this time in about two years, 9x won’t only be totally outdated, but it’ll also be all but unsupported by every hardware and software company under the sun.
You know how Linux people always bag on MS and Windows because they suck? Guess what, it’s 9x they’re bagging on, not 2k. Most Linux freaks I know ENDORSE 2k if you don’t need the specifc functionality of Linux.
Recaptulation:
2k kernal is more stable, faster, and has better, no, scratch that, DRASTICALLY superior memory managment. The memory issues alone should be more than enough to make games use 2k. Every gamer I know, including myself, hasn’t touched 9x since 2k came out.
You may not realize it, but those of us who aren’t totally niave have known the truth for a very long time:
The 9x kernal has been an out-dated and functionally broken since 3.1 first took baby steps into Windows 95. From 95, to 98, to 98se, to ME, features have been added, bugs have been fixed, all the while more bugs were added and more features were broken. Regardless, 9x still has the same inherent flaws it has always had.
Comparing 9x to 2k is not a fair comparison. It’s like comparing a scrapped Pinto to a brand new Ferrari.
This said, if you still don’t want to move to the 2k kernal right away, fine. Whatever floats your boat.
It’s only a matter of time before 98 fails to keep you afloat any longer.
Damn, didn’t even know there were 9x fanboys. I run a retro gaming box of 98se, but I sure as hell wouldn’t run anything else off it.
I didn’t write the article, guys. Dissonance did. He said he left things at the defaults save the changes he specified, so I expect the Luna OS was enabled in WinXP. Dissonance will have to answer some of your other questions.
“Wow. Rabid Win98 fanboys. Now I’ve seen everything.”
Heh, i dismissed that as a troll. Damage wrote the article? Hint, you garner more respect by defending your articles against assaults that you may have mischosen a benchmark OS than by insulting your ex-readership. I really am curious to see how the various incarnations of M$ OS’s fare in benchmarks, but only so far as they are done fairly. I run 98 because I don’t have severe stability problems and it runs well for me. If XP is honestly fast enough, and by enough of a margin to make the crap interface worth it, I’ll upgrade. I simply haven’t seen evidence to that effect. (On that note, is there any way to force XP to single user mode (or as near as 9x gets it), simple 9x interface, get rid of permissions crap I don’t need, etc.? imho, the OS should only work enough to facilitate running programs, and otherwise stay the heck out of the way. hence running fvwm or fvwm2.)
-tk
Okay, call me a fanboy or whatever else makes you feel warm and fuzzy and superior, but…
I really would have liked to see how 98SE fared vs. 2000 and XP.
My puter is used for gaming, gaming, and gaming. The wife balances the checkbook on it sometimes, but aside from such mundane tasks as that, it’s a pure gamer machine.
So really all I care about is which OS is faster in games. Please Damage, we all know that ME stinks, could you at least just run the gaming benchmarks on a 98SE machine for us pathetic guys that are strapped to the 9x kernel? Please? It will be the deciding factor for me whether or not to upgrade.
Damage, did u bench with the Luna GUI or the Win2k GUI on the XP machines, because it makes a difference.
I think the article had a niche, but the low end system wasn’t truely low end IMO. I’ve got friends/family I support (who will not be going to XP) that run 600mhz on avg. Heck, my ‘powerhouse’ is @ 950mhz. I liked the article, if anything it compared 2000 to XP for me just like it said it would.
And for the most part, ME wasn’t having driver issues. It was coping w/ the fact it is ME. It was depressed. Somehow MS meant to make something more stable than 98SE and ended up with something much much worse. Any machine I had WinME on had severe memory mgmt issues and refused to play several games the 98SE had no problem with. If you attempt a rebench I’d be interested to see if it does any different. 🙂
Guys:
3Mark 2001 requires DirectX 8 in order to install and run. I regret that we didn’t list DX8 as installed in our “testing methods” section–it was an oversight–but DX8 was installed on all OSes.
*[
*[
*[
I would have liked to have seen a b[
98 is far better supported than ME by most dirvers, has a LOT of tweaks and pacthes for performance that have accrued over the years
—
the only patch I’d want to use for 9x/ME is the OFF switch. In the past, it used to be the reset button.
I wonder if they left all the eye candy on on XP.
My wife’s machine is dog slow with it on, but she likes it.
I tend to agree w/ most folks here, somethings up with their ME. I run ME on my game box and it usually beats my 2k install on the same box.
Wow. Rabid Win98 fanboys. Now I’ve seen everything.
I’m not getting in to a debate about which windows OS is worse than the other, though I tend to prefer simpler systems (I still use fvwm). I’m just pointing out how badly these tests were run, and that I believe it indicates a bias. Calling my a fanboy is hilarious on this end, the only time I drop out of X is when I need to run a windows app, usually a game, that I haven’t gotten to work in wine or winex yet.
-tk
#12 here again…
Doesn’t ME ship with DX7 instead of DX8? Could that be why its so far behind in the games tests? I mean the Det4’s used are optimized for DX8
#12 here
cRock, It’s not about being a 9x fanboy, but on my own personal machine, my 3dMark and Q3 benches are faster in ME than 2000. Some resourse hoggish games also play better in ME that 2K… Like Giants for instance….
i can hardly believe the ME benches. the repeatedly occuring lower scores of the hig end system seem to me like a bad installation… i wonder if that on the low end machine was so good, also.
i
I’m not going to jump all over you guys for using ME like everyone else, but I do think that in order for ME to work decently (it’s never gonna be that good), you need to disable all kinds of crap that it’s running by default. Also, in my experience, ME (and all 9x’s) doesn’t do much better when you up the memory (like to 256 or 512), so it’s already out of its memory management league in your “low-end” system. I’ve got 40 systems around me running 95 on PII/Celeron 300-450 machines with 64MB RAM – those are low end and I bet that scores would have been a little different with systems like that. It was an interesting article, but I’m also inclined to believe that there might have been something wrong with your ME install since I’ve never withnessed differences on that scale on NT and 9x machines before.
Careful guys, the Windows 9x fanboys are coming out of the woodwork and they look rabid….. like Mac users!!!!!
Even if 9x was as fast as NT kernel OSes (and it’s not on decent hardware), the price paid in stability is too high.
Goodbye Windows 9x. I won’t miss you!
No mention in the article at infoworld:
§[<http://www.infoworld.com/articles/tc/xml/01/10/29/011029tcwinxp.xml<]§ I would have liked a comparison with SMP to confirm/refute these results. Especially since a lot of users have duallies.
Yea really, you used ME. You actually own a copy of Windows ME, you’re telling me that for you choice of Win 9x operating systems you chose ME. I used to respect your opinion. I’m very strongly reconsidering.
What an awful article.
98 is far better supported than ME by most dirvers, has a LOT of tweaks and pacthes for performance that have accrued over the years, but all were left in the cold to give XP an additional boost. Any serious gamer is going to work with his machine to get maximum fps, and the benchmarks should reflect such dedication. Comparing 98 the way it was when it released, and XP, the results are predictable. Compare the current state of 98 with XP, and the results are MUCH closer.
Also, more investigation should have gone in to the terrible scores on the 98 high perf. Failing to persue that, and calling the next performance hit “a problem with ME and not the drivers” is once again displaying a bias. Not that this is surprising, as in the introduction they admit to being “NT snobs”, but it’s still sad.
-tk
Is it just me, or does something seem really broken on the ME install used in the tests????
Dude.. he/you used ME as the 9x core.. are you mad? At least use 98SE… it’s the most stable, and has the maturist drivers for it (probably wouldn’t have gotten them rediculously low scores). I can’t beleive you compared the 9x core with the NT core using WinME… no wonder the NT core looks so much better.
Billy
Well it’s nice to see that XP is not the extreme performance pig everyone was ranting about. I didn’t notice any performance drops running on an Intel P-III 650 between it and 2k I however turn all the gui off. I can’t stand it.
XP looks to be the best overall OS from M$. However, I would stick with 2k in the office. Good performance, much less fluff.
InfoWorld used Intel CPU’s, you used Athlon. Is that significant? Would be incredible if that were true. Any intent to make one more comparision?
I got the copy off of a friend of mine, is it possible it is a cracked version? My friend also has every beta of XP that ever existed, is it possible I am running a late beta? It seems to be the full version. I installed it over 30 days ago, still no “product activation” harrassment.
—————
Ask your friend if it’s the DevilsOwn release. He should know what it means if he’s a warez hound. I’m 99% certain it is, since this is the most popular version that’s been doing the rounds that doesn’t require activation. And no, it’s not a beta.
MS wanted to stop casual copying, which they’ve done with the Activation thing, I guess, keeping the piracy more or less underground.
I’m hanging for a few months before I try it. Waiting for those bugfixes and extra drivers and compatibility probs to be ironed out with applications.
Everybody I know runs the Corporate Edition which doesn’t require running WPA. Hell, even if I had a legit version I would install Corp. Ed just to avoid WPA.
256MB: Slow
512MB: Snappy 🙂
If would probably go for more mem if my mainboard had more slots.
AG 4 – It sounds like you have a cracked version. From what I understand, *every* version of XP has WPA built in. If you have a legal version of 2K, ME or 98SE then an upgrade to XP Pro is actually pretty reasonable (around $295 CDN). XP Home’s lack of domain support means that any intelligent person should avoid it.
There’s a Corporate Version of XP which requires no activation, as that’s the version that’s been doing the rounds on the warez scene I suspect that’s what you have…
Same probably applies to your Office XP.
Whats with all this product activation stuff??? I am multibooting with ME, XP(business) and mandrake 8.1. When I installed XP it didnt force me to activate anything. It asked me if I wanted to register, but it didnt force me too(I didn’t). It runs fine.
I got the copy off of a friend of mine, is it possible it is a cracked version? My friend also has every beta of XP that ever existed, is it possible I am running a late beta? It seems to be the full version. I installed it over 30 days ago, still no “product activation” harrassment.
I dont know too terribly much about XP(I have it for the girlfriend)
I also have OfficeXP for her too with no activation…
If anybody can enlighten me, please do.
Diss,
may want to check the SANDRA graphs on pg 2 – they appear to be identical. Great article – no XP for me
how can all those poor communist $50 average wage a month bastards afford a computer than can run xp?
*[Originally Posted by Trident