Windows 2000 and gaming?

[kevinthenerd]

I didn't read the whole thread, but I didn't find "Diablo" in the search I did on it, so here it goes...

I remember an insane difference in performance running all Blizzard games under Win98 and Win2k. I'd stick with Windows 2000 if I still did a lot of gaming, but college is now sucking up all my game time. I stick with Linux now for writing papers and doing server admin for my job at the university's office of information technology.

I'd go with Windows 2000 any day on any of these titles (in no particular order). Some of them are old, but they're what I like.

Lords of the Realm II
Incoming
Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition
Starcraft
Starcraft: Brood War
Diablo
Diablo: Hellfire
Diablo II
Diablo II: Lord of Destruction
Warcraft III

Plus, for my personal use, Windows 2000 has more built-in tools for doing server work, but I understand that's off the topic here.

All of these observations are based on a Celeron 433 with 512 MB of RAM and a 15GB HDD.

(You may notice that the RAM is higher than on my other posts. Back when I did gaming, I had more RAM, but then my mom needed extra RAM in her box. I took her 64 and gave her a stick of 256, to make mine go from 512 (256+256) to 320 (256+64) and hers go from 96 (64+32) to 288 (256+32). )

 

[smitty99]

Originally posted by: BmXStuD
Well if you want to game and use xp make sure you have more than 256mb ram. If you dont have more than 256mb as soon as you go into a game you will start to hit PAGEFILE hard, than when you leave the game your pc is going to be laggy and only thing you can do is REBOOT. How do i know this b/c it happen to me till i got more than256mb ram. Btw this happen on 2k and xp for me.

Rebooting saves you nothing - pullling stuff out of the pagefile takes on hell of a lot less time than a full reboot. Yes, it does take Mozilla a fem more moments to come up than it normally would if it is paged, but what's five secods of lag compared to a full reboot? After it's read back into RAM, you shouldn't have more lag until you hit another still-paged app.

 

[videobruce]

There seems to be parallel threads of the 2k vs XP issue:

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=34&threadid=996289