Athlon 700-> WinXP or Win98?

[Gerbil333]

XP. It's more stable, and drivers and software should be more available and compatible for XP.

I ran XP on a 1ghz Thunderbird back when XP first came out. I can't imagine the 700MHz CPU being too much slower.

 

[Nothinman]

Well, here's one thing: There's this (bug?) thing, that started in Win98SE, and is easier to activate in XP: it's a different combination of keys for every copy of Windows, but once pressed, (say you accidentally put a plate on your keyboard) it crashes your system

I find that extremely hard to believe, at least about XP, just about anything can crash a Win9X system pretty easily.

(And, the "unable to install XP over 8 times" was news I got from my dad, who knows more about these things than I could imagine.

Well he's wrong, you can install it as many times as you want. But you do only get a certain amount of automatic activations, after which you have to call MS and tell them why you need to reinstall, then they give you a key to put in and go about your business. From what I've heard the call takes less than 5 minutes.

 

[NeptuneNavigator2001]

Meh. Whatever...
Okay, so he's wrong. But, I for one, prefer the "do-it-yourself" method; except for boards like these.

Well, doesn't XP take up more system resources?

 

[Nothinman]

Well, doesn't XP take up more system resources?

It's hard to gauge considering the OSes are so different. But I would say yes, probably, but it's also well worth it. You can disable all of the UI crap if you want and if you're anal about free memory (as way too many people seem to be) you can disable a lot of the services that run by default.

But one thing that's really fun to do is open enough windows to see Win9X run out of GDI resources, it uses a global pool for everything and doing something as simple as opening a lot of IE windows can exhaust that pool and screw up the entire OS until you reboot. And the pool size is set, you can't adjust it and it doesn't get larger if you have more memory. XP on the other hand has the right idea, each process has their own GDI resource pool so if you run out of resources you only screw one app, not the entire OS.

 

[Randabis]

Originally posted by: Netopia

But hey, there's also one more thing that 98SE has over XP: native DOS support. I'm one of those guys who likes to run the oldest games next to the newest games, so I'm going for major compatibility, i.e., installing 98SE and 2K on different partitions

Have you TRIED XP in compatibility mode? There are many DOS games that I couldn't play on Win2K that play flawlessly on XP. Exactly which DOS based games have you tried to run in compatibility mode on XP that won't work?

Windows 2000 has compatibility mode also. It just isn't enabled by default.

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
But one thing that's really fun to do is open enough windows to see Win9X run out of GDI resources, it uses a global pool for everything and doing something as simple as opening a lot of IE windows can exhaust that pool and screw up the entire OS until you reboot. And the pool size is set, you can't adjust it and it doesn't get larger if you have more memory. XP on the other hand has the right idea, each process has their own GDI resource pool so if you run out of resources you only screw one app, not the entire OS.

Ugh, I'd forgotten about that.

 

[imported_Kiwi]

Looking at the minimums that MS prints on the XP box, and allowing for their "need" to fudge on that aspect, if they say a 233 MHz cpu would work, go to at least TWICE that speed. If they say 128 MB's of free RAM, then go with double of that, to 256, and allow for shared video RAM if you use a MB with built-in video. There are web pages devoted to descriptions of how to hunt down most of the performance-robbing extra services and unnecessary bells and whistles that XP includes, so XP is potentially useful, even on low-powered PC's.

Personally, I am unwilling to spend that much time correcting Microsoft's bloat. I went back to Win2K.

:thumbsdown:

 

[newParadigm]

XP Will run fine, i got it runnin on a PII 350 with 128 megs o RAM. It take a little while to boot, but it not too bad once your in.

~New

 

[Satyrist]

Originally posted by: malak
The OS isn't stable because of stable hardware or drivers. It's software that kills it. XP handles crashes much better than 98. Where 98 might blue screen, XP simply shuts the application down without any harm to the OS.

Usually.