Which system do YOU like BEST:

Windows 2000

or

Windows XP
Posted on 2004-02-14 08:02:56 by The SharK
I've always prefeered W2K, but without cleartype or themes I'll be sticking with XP for a while longer.
Posted on 2004-02-14 09:48:55 by Eóin
Well, actually Win98lite is the best. :)
Posted on 2004-02-14 10:13:49 by JohnFound
I will be moving to XP soon, and this is only because of my customers. Otherwise I'd stay with 98SE, and if I had to move I'd move to W2k.
Posted on 2004-02-14 10:16:40 by Ultrano
For my own needs, I still prefer win2k... there hasn't been much, if any, reason for me to upgrade to XP, and there's a whole lot of stuff you have to tweak to turn off all the cuddly fluffy eyecandy crap.

However, XP does have vectored exception handling and the ability to detach debugging from a process without terminating it - this could be nice for some toolwriting. And afaik, you can also turn off the use of pagingfile (which doesn't seem to be possible with win2k), a thing that would be nice to do after I shoved a gig of ram into my machine.

Other than that, it's not a big deal I guess. Both systems are stable and fast and have good driver support, and I've installed XP at my brothers' boxes + at the museum, as it *is* easier to handle for regular people.

Once they fix a couple of minor (but annoying!) GUI bugs, I might try switching over to XP again on my own box, and see how good/bad it is when put under some serious abuse ;)
Posted on 2004-02-14 10:19:31 by f0dder
Ultrano, if you have enough RAM, you should start liking 2k/XP after a while... the system is really so much better and stable.
Posted on 2004-02-14 10:20:37 by f0dder
In about half an hour, I kill my XP, and switch to 2K - WITH MIDI AND WAVE SOUND ;-D
Posted on 2004-02-14 10:26:55 by The SharK
Could just be me, but midi and wave sound work fine on all my XP systems (I use both Home and Pro).
Oh, and none of them has ever crashed for anything other than display driver bugs either.
To me it's the fastest, most stable and robust OS I've ever used, and I feel no need to ever look back.

Oh, and turning off your pagefile seems like a rather silly thing to do anyway. It's asking for trouble, I suppose.
Posted on 2004-02-14 10:32:31 by Henk-Jan
XP is best if you've got the system to back it up (it crawls a bit more on lower end machines thank 2K).
I've had no problems with sound either (although I only use it at work at the moment).

The first thing I do with XP is make it look like 2K, all the fancy nonsense annoys me, but you turn all that off and it's just as good as 2K. It also has the handy dandy feature of reporting bugs to MS, which also allows them to tell you what went wrong and what the fix is if they've already investigated it. Although having said that, it is an incredibly annoying feature if you're debugging an app of your own that keeps crashing ("do you want me to tell MS about this crash", no, I caused the crash and will fix it myself now shut up!).

Also the startup time of XP is fantastic, 2K is much slower in that regard.

Mirno
Posted on 2004-02-14 10:58:54 by Mirno

Oh, and turning off your pagefile seems like a rather silly thing to do anyway. It's asking for trouble, I suppose.

With a gig of ram? :rolleyes: - I'll rather take an app crash in the case it can't allocate memory, than constantly having pagefile usage even when not necessary.

Heh, luckily the MS bugreporting shit can be turned off and you can still get register + stack dump iirc.
Posted on 2004-02-14 11:29:29 by f0dder
With a gig of ram? - I'll rather take an app crash in the case it can't allocate memory, than constantly having pagefile usage even when not necessary.


1 gb of ram goes a considerably longer way if inactive pages can be swapped out. Besides, I have had over 1 gb of pagefile use in the past, I wouldn't want things to start crashing, a bit of hdd activity seems like a much better alternative :)
I dunno, turning off the pagefile gives me the feeling of going back to the 60s. The biggest advantage of a pagefile is the fact that you don't have a hard memory limit, I suppose. You just get a warning when the pagefile is getting large, and things continue to work, so you can just kill the app that is taking up the memory.
Posted on 2004-02-14 12:07:57 by Henk-Jan
I used to have Windows 2000 and I was PERFECTLY happy with it *ALL* games and apps were running fine, like NO crashes and stuff. I'm using XP right now, the only reason I'm using it is because my HDD died and I bought a 40GB and the Windows 2000 install didnt work so I just installed XP. I want to go back.
Posted on 2004-02-14 21:15:07 by x86asm
x86asm,

Off-topic : About code optimization, is really Watcom better that VC++ ?
Posted on 2004-02-15 04:15:03 by Vortex
I think the only compiler that can beat VC++ is the Intel compiler.
Posted on 2004-02-15 06:06:00 by Henk-Jan
I don't no if you'd notice......but I have changed back from XP to 2K,
and guess what - THE MIDI AND WAV FILES WORKS NOW ;-))))))))))))))
Posted on 2004-02-15 06:32:40 by The SharK
Couldn't you just have installed a sound driver in XP? Sheesh. As if it's the OS' fault that you either didn't install a driver, or that the driver for your soundcard happens to be bugged. There are millions of people with working sound in XP, you know. Even on my SB Live! 5.1 with my VIA KT133A chipset it works fine!
So, don't blame the OS, blame your soundcard or drivers.
Posted on 2004-02-15 07:20:35 by Henk-Jan
I tried everything, at least I think.


And as f0dder said, there is:

"a whole lot of stuff you have to tweak to turn off all the cuddly fluffy eyecandy crap"
couln't have said it better :tongue:


So this goes at least as far as computers concerned:

Big is nice, but small is better.........I know what ya all think now....but I said COMPUTERS :tongue:

and hey, we like small assembly related things right ;)
Posted on 2004-02-15 07:33:32 by The SharK
Originally posted by Henk-Jan
I think the only compiler that can beat VC++ is the Intel compiler.

Will Sphinx C-- beat VC++ ;)

I prefer 2K, XP is slow in keyboard respond.
Try this -> in window explorer use mouse or keyboard to select some files (make sure you don't need any more), press shift - delete and immediately with Enter key. In 2K it delete the files, in XP it open the files :eek:
Posted on 2004-02-15 07:39:44 by QS_Ong
I prefer 2K, XP is slow in keyboard respond.
Try this -> in window explorer use mouse or keyboard to select some files (make sure you don't need any more), press shift - delete and immediately with Enter key. In 2K it delete the files, in XP it open the files


Or could that be a deliberate safeguard in XP, so you won't accidentally delete files? You tell me.
Posted on 2004-02-15 08:42:55 by Henk-Jan
oh, and another thing which was a HUGE problem with XP,
when you saw a movie or even touching some movie files,
XP made explorer.exe go crazy with billions of READS and WRITES,
which made the whole system go sooooo sloooooooow.
The only solution to that, was to starup Taskmanager
and close down the explorer.exe process.

In Windows 2K, there is NO crazy billions of READS and WRITES
in explorer.exe, so you can watch a movie, without watching for explorer.exe ;)
Posted on 2004-02-15 09:17:22 by The SharK