Augustus said:
How marginal a system are you running? XP requires much higher hardware
resources. 98SE on a PIII 733 with 128Meg is super fast.
You should see it with an Athlon 64 and a gig! W00t! lol! We' re talking
window maximizing approaching relativistic intervals here ;-) (yeah, I know,
menu show delay, no animation, I had to spoil the joke.) Surfs the internet
faster, too! No, really! With IE, anyhoo...
Load XP on the
same box, and it's still usable, but sluggish and extremely tight for memory
and resources. Bump the memory up to 512 and XP will speed up
considerably.
"512K should be enough for everybody"---Bill Gates.
All things being equal, most 3D apps run faster under XP than with 98 so
long as your CPU/memory is adequate.
I dunno about that, unless hyperthreading or real MP is factored into the
picture...I think it would be fair to say that this is the case for a
basically OOTB setup, but with we advanced users, this is hardly the case.
Food for idle thoughts, I s'pose. Either environment is highly tweakable. XP
more so, simply because you HAVE to: there's five more pounds of $#!+
stuffed into the ten pounds already stuffed into a five-pound paper bag. Far
too many unnecessary services and datamining BS running OOTB with XP. (One
wonders where the memory is going, no? Of course XP manages memory a little
more effectively...it HAS to with all that load of bollocks going on in the
background!). But with single and non-hyperthreading CPUs, it seems the
playing field is fairly level, as it were.
I consider 256Meg for XP to be adequate
for productivity apps, browsing, etc, but not for gaming.
Yeah, mostly single-use stuff, not multiple app windows open, heavy task
switching, etc. With XP, a gig is a wonderful security blanket...
512Mb should be
your minimum for gaming. At 512Mb XP has about as much headroom as 98SE does
with 128Mb.
Disable lots of startups, whatever service you can get away with. Especially
lock down that "phone home to Big Brother and broadcast my unsecured IP addy
ALL OVER the network, hi, I'm here, fill me with your automated active
scriptie!" f$cktard's idea of TCP services which makes the script kiddies
luv yer XP boxen so much. (M$ touts increased $ecurity with XP then leaves
the average home user WFO to serious buggery in an even more blatant fashion
than before=DOUBLESPEAK) Then the memory footprint of the OS runs ok within
256 megs with most games except for games like Painkiller which chugs a bit
without at least a svelte, tuned 384 (512 minimum recommendation is no lie).
Realistically, (I know what you're getting at, and I agree completely, but
still...), 98SE would be hitting the swap file with 128 megs quite a bit
with current games, and with 512 megs, she don' got to! Still, no denying
after all these years that 98SE is
just as stable
easier to administer
FAR more streamlined
Just as secure if not MORE SO for the single-user environment (i.e. home
computer, not work or public terminal)
Still better for gaming, especially with older boxen
Plus: 'Sploits are targetted more towards XP boxen, because they're what's
for lunch. And we all know what growing boys need besides a knock on the
door from some men in blue suits now and then. Rest assured, with new
security features built in to next generations of hardware and software,
that served process will be more easily facilitated. But for now, there is
little to no security and backdoors are being uncovered in M$'s Holy
Cheeseblock practically weekly.
Big plus: Files M$ wants to hide from you are more easily accessible (can
you say "Dosshell"?), unless you install XP to a FAT32 partition.
98SE/ME is far from dead. There's a whole previous generation of user base
still pluggin' away on it.
Feel free to disagree, not like anyone needs any encouragement ;-); however,
this is not flamebait, but observations based upon years of practical
experience.
Standard disclaimer: I use and love to hate all current M$ OSes
indiscriminately and absolutely, and I'm learning to love to hate Linux and
OS-X more and more as time goes by in order to resolve issues of love/hate
dependencies with Microsoft.
As basically itt wasn't much more than OS