Xp does not have any dos support, I'm not even sure what you are talking about...
Personally I ever looked back on W2k after switching to XP

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In XP you can turn off some of the graphical changes for a more classic look.

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2K/XP have the same "DOS Support" aka NTVDM

Only difference is XP NTVDM has SB16 support.....but you'll still need to use vdmsound anyway.

Why you are using an old ass P3 to run DOS games in NTVDM is beyond me. You'd be far better off running the games in DOSBox (on a modern machine) or running them in real MS-DOS on an older machine.

Bu

Win2K all the way. Fastest and most stable operating system ever made by Microsoft.

If you want dos support.. install dos.

Or you could do like I did, run a dual-boot with Win ME + Win 2K and use all the ME patches to support Hyper Threading and 1GB of ram.

Of course this was more for a test in my case as I wanted to see what a Socket 478 P4 would do 😉

As for an older P3 machine, I would recommend the dual-boot option as well, DOS on a 2GB partition and Windows 98-SE on another.

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You may want to check out this forum post and see if they have some links and/or patches for this.

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/95815-importa … 98-seme-topics/

I guess if you are really wanting to support SMP properly then you will have to go with Win 2K or XP.

Of course nothing would keep you from doing a triple-boot system either, just have to have separate partitions is all.

jwt27 wrote:

Win2K all the way. Fastest and most stable operating system ever made by Microsoft.
If you want dos support.. install dos.

I agree Win2k is the best OS compared to Win95/98/ME/NT/XP/7. It has all the important functionalities without the questionable features. Unfortunately I do experience how certain software is lately compiled to require WinXP or up, even if there are no real reasons for it.

voodoo do-er wrote:

do not think 98 has SMP support
so the second pent would go to waist
if you know of a way to get smp support with 98 I'm all ears

Does not matter for games. Unless a game is programmed to be multi threaded, it will not take advantage of the second CPU, so it will go to "waist", anyway. As noted by DosFreak, NT does not have DOS, but a very imperfect DOS emulator, the NTVDM (NT Virtual DOS Machine). As far as 2K goes, while it was a great OS in its own right, it was not designed for gaming. There were compatibility issues it had with many games that XP never had problems with.

That said, I am not sure what your problem is with DOSBox, but it is really the best way to play DOS games. It is far easier to get most games properly running in DOSBox than it was in real DOS. If you want to play these games, just use real DOS or DOSBox on a modern machine.

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voodoo do-er wrote:

I will be playing a lot of newer games on the system as well games that support smp, so I will need/use the second cpu I'm tryi […]
Show full quote

I will be playing a lot of newer games on the system as well
games that support smp, so I will need/use the second cpu
I'm trying to get a best of both wards thing going
EDIT
I will most likely do what "BigBodZod" said
a triple boot with dos 9x and 2k/xp

Thing is most of the older games don't support SMP, and require workarounds to run in XP/2k. While those games that do support SMP will likely be too much for a 1ghz coppermine to handle, duallie or no.

EDIT
I've made a new thread to list down SMP enabled retro games. Dual CPUs are too cool 😎

jwt27 wrote:

Win2K all the way. Fastest and most stable operating system ever made by Microsoft.

With 512 MB of RAM, XP is faster than 2K, in theory.

http://home.comcast.net/~SupportCD/XPMyths.html#Optimization
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457057.aspx

Keep in mind that the Themes service can be easily disabled, although as I recall its resource demands after applying the service packs are not nearly as bad as they were in the first release.

Windows 2000 also has more unpatched security vulnerabilities, since it has been unsupported for much longer.

voodoo do-er wrote:

I'm trying to get a best of both wards thing going

It is much better to have it do one thing really well than have it do two things poorly.

P.S. Waste, not waist.

Jorpho wrote:

Windows 2000 also has more unpatched security vulnerabilities, since it has been unsupported for much longer.

Officially but not unofficially: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/146529-pe-too … post__p__939886

😁

voodoo do-er wrote:

I just can't seem to pick witch one to use, what would you use ?

I'd use XP. You can always make it look more like 2k by turning down it's graphics settings. On top of that, you can slipstream XP more easily and surfing the net is easier since it's still supported.

I'm still not particularly convinced that the benefits of slipstreaming should carry much weight if one is only installing once. But anyway, nLite supports slipstreaming 2K.
http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html

Jorpho wrote:

I'm still not particularly convinced that the benefits of slipstreaming should carry much weight if one is only installing once. But anyway, nLite supports slipstreaming 2K.
http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html

Who who uses retro computers only installs a main retro OS only once? And last I heard was that 2k isn't as slipstreamable as XP is