What video card and sound card are you using? It isn't much surprise though because Win9x is leaner and has more direct hardware access for example. But it can also be worsened by drivers which aren't well developed for NT 5 WDM. Generally though I think as hardware got faster, people accepted less gaming efficiency (like there was a choice anyway).

for the sound card Im using an SBLive , for the graphics its a Geforce2 Ti

as for drivers, I actually tried both the equivelent drivers and the latest ones I found, using the latest ones did improve things slightly , but not a whole lot.

Maybe you would see a big difference on a SMP config with running lots of stuff in the background, but other than that I think 2k's strong point was just stability...

I've had surprising driver difficulties when installing 2k on my BX rig btw. Can't remember details but Live! certainly didn't work, along with other stuff.

actually for the most part the drivers worked fine, its the odd performance that makes one wonder.

very interesting that Quake3 engine games seem to run as well or better on 2000 though , maybe the engine is better optimized (perhaps the dual CPU support is part of that)

I've never seen Win2000 underperform on my machines (given over 64mb RAM of course - a 486 with 32mb won't cut it well).

There's also a few rare cases of Win2000 being faster than Win98SE on PENTIUM systems, particularly ones with average video hardware such as C&T65550 that have better developed drivers for Win2k. Having lots of RAM (over 64mb) does certainly help against the NT footprint however.

Windows 2000. Man, what an awesome OS that was...

It seems normal to me that it would be slower than 98SE, since it has a larger footprint than that. It was a lot like Windows XP and Vista/7. XP was faster and most people didn't care to move to 7 when not too many DX11 games were around.
Provided that you had a beefy machine (mainly lots of RAM) or just didn't care about games, 2000 was an amazing OS to have, maybe not so much initially due to drivers. With Service Pack 2, Windows XP matured and became the OS of choice I would say.

oh yeah , don't get me wrong, in terms of stability, navigation speed , setup its fantastic, I did use Win2000 briefly back in 2000-1 but never really played too many games on it since it wasn't my personal PC.

its pretty obvious why XP was based on 2000 , as opposed to something like ME (actually, Im wondering why did Millenium turned out that bad, it was based on Win9x , which wasn't that bad, heck I remember Me not letting me install DirectX easily , due to being identified as a malicious program....)

however, 10 frames less in some places (Warcraft 3 was one such case , frames went from the high 40s to the mid 30s ), makes me wonder if its more than just 2000s system usage, it could very well be drivers or games not being optimized for it in general.

Me's complaints tend to be about

- "Where are my programs?" feature backported from Windows 2000
- bugged System Restore
- The removal of booting to MS-DOS as well as the stripping of SYS so you couldn't make bootable DOS floppies
- The eating of the autoexec.bat/config.sys

leileilol wrote:

Me's complaints tend to be about […]
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Me's complaints tend to be about

- "Where are my programs?" feature backported from Windows 2000
- bugged System Restore
- The removal of booting to MS-DOS as well as the stripping of SYS so you couldn't make bootable DOS floppies
- The eating of the autoexec.bat/config.sys

my main complaint at the time was the fact it kept on crashing the minute you breathed on it, it crashed many more years in the 1 or so year I had it (came with the PC, so I didn't get much of a choice), than in the 4 or so years I had my Win95/98SE machine beforehand.

one particular event that sticks out was when I installed Tomb Raider III on it, for a reason I can't remember, that caused the machine to crash and it took a long time trying to get Windows to boot up again.

when everything worked it was actually ok , its just that most of the time something was going wrong, which makes you wonder if it was rushed, or was the Win9x architecture just reaching its end point.