Jorpho wrote:

Darkman wrote:

that said, one issue Ive noticed when using a Sound Blaster Live in such a system is that FMVs skip and stutter in some games (Diablo 2 and System Shock 2 being 2 examples), which is the main reason why my SMP system uses an Audigy, where those problems do not exist.

System Shock 2 is one of the games most commonly cited as freezing up entirely when multiple cores are present unless explictly patched one way or another to only use one CPU.

yes it does, as it uses the same engine as Thief and Thief 2 , which also freeze, Grim Fandango has the same issue. Other games Ive noticed that have this stuttering problems are Fallout ,Starcraft, Tiberian Sun , and RA2, none of which have issues running per se, but have various sound and FMV stutter isses when running on an SMP system. Again the easiest solution Ive found is simply to use an Audigy (other cards might also do the trick).

Creative Sound Blaster drivers were notorious in the early days for not handling SMP well.
Mind you, if the issue is in the game itself, you can probably get around that by starting the game using the 'affinity mask' feature of Windows to limit it to a single core/CPU.

F2bnp wrote:

Man, I sure am glad that people around here have opened up to the idea that SP3 is kind of a resource hog. I remember that not too long ago, I voiced some concern and suggested avoiding SP3 on older systems, only to be made fun of 😜.

Then you should tell those same people that you've been running Windows ME for years without any significant troubles and don't really understand what all the fuzz about instability was about 🤣

F2bnp wrote:

I have no experience with SP1, or rather it has been so long since I had WinXP with SP1 or vanilla installed that I just can't remember if there was a performance difference with SP2, so I can't comment on this. But try to avoid SP3, unless you feel like experimenting a bit 😁.

I actually never knew XP SP2 was actually slower for P3 compared to SP1 due to changes in the code. I had always assumed this was mostly to do with SP2 having increased needs to eat resources simply because it contained many newer updates that weren't available before (mostly bugfixes and security updates that aren't important for an offline rig anyway).

Would be interesting to see how XP SP1 can be patched up with the goodness of SP2 without its special P4 code. I'm thinking particularly for use with P3.

hyoenmadan wrote:

Also don't forget to disable System Restore after system install.

This is actually something I can recommend for older hardware of say Pentium 3-era, it can really help and you'll probably hardly ever need it anyway.

Service Pack 2 for XP included a lot of changes and it positively did increase the overhead of the OS. I don't know exactly why, but I remember vividly the performance differences went going between SP1 and SP2. With SP1 you could run smoothly on as little as 128MB of RAM. With SP2 windows would feel bogged down even with 256MB.

Rhuwyn wrote:

Service Pack 2 for XP included a lot of changes and it positively did increase the overhead of the OS. I don't know exactly why, but I remember vividly the performance differences went going between SP1 and SP2. With SP1 you could run smoothly on as little as 128MB of RAM. With SP2 windows would feel bogged down even with 256MB.

I do remember SP2 being very hard to run well with 256MB, 512MB was really needed for me to enjoy these rigs.

I'm not even sure I even used XP before SP2 was released, perhaps only when using someone else's computer (I was still running ME most of the time).
I'm wondering what benefits SP2 brought for older rigs...maybe it brought some crash fixes or something?
If so, would be interesting to see if the beneficial can be slipstreamed onto a SP1 source disk specifically for use on older rigs with much less max memory (I'm thinking particularly about i815 with P3 here).