Originally posted by: rogue1979
Update: I waited a week for testing with a dual boot and here is my opinion.
Win2000 Pro is no more stable than Win98SE. In one week I haven't had a single crash or freeze in either one.
You are one of the few lucky people who has one of the very few lucky combinations of hardware who's drivers do not interfere in a Win9x based OS. In Windows 98, rebooting every few days is considered preventative maintenance; that's probably why you've never noticed any stability problems with '98. I can run my Windows 2000 (and .NET server) systems for several weeks under heavy workloads, and they never show any signs of slowing down or getting instable.
But then, as I have said before, I go months without one single problem in Win98 with a highly overclocked computer playing a million games constantly. The only thing going for Win2000 Pro is it is actually easier to set up. But is is much slower than Win98, even when I borrowed another 256MB of DDR for 512MB total.
Sounds like a DMA-not-enabled-on-the-harddisk problem to me. When I went from Windows ME (similar to 98) on a low end HP Pavilion to Windows 2000 Pro, the speed and stability of the system went up quite noticeably. Applications didn't start a whole lot faster, but you could start a lot of applications at once, and they'd all work quite reliably and smoothly. FWIW, that system was dedicated to sound recording and Powerpoint, and under Windows ME it was almost impossible to do both at the same time; now, with Windows 2000 Pro, I can record, show a presentation on the 2nd monitor (incidentally, the ATI Xpert@Play 98 PCI used for said monitor was not compatible with the integrated Intel chipset gfx under Windows ME, but it works fine under Win2k), and do a gazillion other things at once. This is on a 766MHz Celeron with 128MB of RAM, FYI.
All my applications load a little slower and my desktop feels slower too. I went into service and turned off a bunch of worthless crap, but it didn't help. Also I have a nice scanner that is about 2 or 3 years old that has no NTFS driver available in the known universe.
Old scanners can be a problem for WinNT-based OSes. Luckily, my HP scanner has drivers; though they don't work perfectly, they work well enough to hold me over until I can get a nicer scanner. Oh, and FYI, NTFS is a file system type, not a driver type.
I run a highly stripped down version of Win98, it is lean, mean, fast and incredibly stable. Win2000 Pro really isn't that bad, but I am putting it down hard because it really should be superior to Win98 in every way, and it doesn't come close.
For most everyone else, Windows 2000 far surpasses Windows 98 in every way. I sense some sort of PICNIC issue here.
At least for me NTFS doesn't do squat, I don't see any superior memory management or stability, I just notice a bloated lethargic OS.
NTFS provides better reliability, and security (which is non-existant in FAT32). Maybe you don't care about either, but I do, and I much prefer the NTFS to the FAT32 filesystem. Also, did it ever occur to you that maybe you're not seeing any advantages in the memory management dept. because you're not stressing your system. Gaming is not a particularly stressful activity for anything other than the CPU and video card (although modern games are starting to use more RAM, that's not what stresses the memory management subsystem; heavy multitasking with lots of apps that all use lots of RAM is what will stress the aforementioned subsystem).
Go ahead and flame me and say I don't have things set up correctly and what not, but that's not the problem. I guess for a server that stays on 24/7 NTFS is better, but for a desktop gaming rig it just blows hot air. Since I am displaying a sour and prejudiced opinion here, I 'll go one step further to provoke some flaming. For everybody using Win2000Pro for non server use and insisting that it is far superior to Win98, this means two things.
(1) you never took the time to tweak and set up Win98 properly
(2) your trying really hard to convince yourself that the money you gave to Microshaft was worth it
Then why are so many gamers around here using Windows 2000 or XP instead of Windows 98?
Although you'll instantly throw out my opinion, because I prefer Windows 2000, I will say that back in the day when I was using Windows 98, I had it tweaked to the max; no extra system tray applications, no unneeded background stuff (\HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Currentversion\Run\ was as clean as it could be) was running, and all drivers were up to date. My hardware, although not top of the line, was not cheap and crappy stuff either. Nevertheless, Windows 98 would not stay up more than a day or two before becoming extremely sluggish and having to be rebooted. It would BSOD at least a few times each week, and "this program has performed an illegal operation"s were very common.
I paid for Windows 2000 OEM version, which I got when I also purchased some other hardware for my computer. It was well worth what I paid for it. Currently, I'm using Linux more and more, and find that it's even better than Windows 2000, but that's not really on topic here, so I digress...
I'll say it one more time, Win2000 Pro actually runs OK, I just expected so much more after reading all these threads in here about how Win98 sucks compared to 2000/XP.
I'll say it one more time (if I have said it already): If your computing habits are to reboot your computer each day (or shut it off at night), and if you never run more than one or two apps at one time, you'll probably not see any benefit to Windows 2000. For those of us who run distributed computing projects, or do other CPU-intensive things with our computers, 24/7/365.25, and also do a lot of multitasking with applications like SoundForge, Photoshop, VMWare, Premiere, etc., Windows 2000 / XP provides many compelling reasons why it should be used rather than Windows 98.