Windows 95 uses VxD drivers, while Windows ME can use WDM drivers. VxD drivers in theory offer better performance than WDM drivers, but at the cost of stability.

If one is comparing a version of Windows 95 with IE4 to Windows ME running VxD drivers, I would not expect much of a difference, especially with older games.

Jorpho wrote:

Windows 95 uses VxD drivers, while Windows ME can use WDM drivers. VxD drivers in theory offer better performance than WDM drivers, but at the cost of stability.

If one is comparing a version of Windows 95 with IE4 to Windows ME running VxD drivers, I would not expect much of a difference, especially with older games.

WDM drivers don't allow you to use a sound card hardware synth/midi, do they?

Is there something in particular that leads you to ask that question? There aren't a lot of sound cards that have both WDM and VxD drivers.

I know that some of the SB-Live cards had both, including my Dell OEM 5.1

Not sure I noticed the hardware synth/midi not working though with the WDM drivers.... hmmm.

Yes, the SB Live cards would be the primary example, but I'm not sure you could call that "hardware synth/midi", considering those cards can use soundfonts stored in system RAM.

bluejeans wrote:

Going to run it on a pentium 133 with 48mb ram, only intending to use doom95 and vanilla doom.

If there is any impact in performance from Windows ME vs 95, it will probably be way less than the difference in performance from Doom95 vs DOS Doom. I recently ran a few tests to see the impact of different operating systems on Doom on a Pentium 133MHz laptop, and on Windows 95 there was about 20% less FPS on Doom95 compared to running the DOS version on a DOS session.

devius wrote:

bluejeans wrote:

Going to run it on a pentium 133 with 48mb ram, only intending to use doom95 and vanilla doom.

If there is any impact in performance from Windows ME vs 95, it will probably be way less than the difference in performance from Doom95 vs DOS Doom. I recently ran a few tests to see the impact of different operating systems on Doom on a Pentium 133MHz laptop, and on Windows 95 there was about 20% less FPS on Doom95 compared to running the DOS version on a DOS session.

I'm guessing you used the ticrates of timedemos to measure the fps?

I remember reviews showed ME had faster boot but scored slightly less in benchmarks once in. I think it was round 2%? not much though.
Real world I doubt it'll make any difference, Specially A P133 with plenty of RAM just playing doom.

chinny22 wrote:

I remember reviews showed ME had faster boot but scored slightly less in benchmarks once in. I think it was round 2%? not much though.

Well, that's a given, since one of the official targets of WinME was reducing boot times by skipping all of the DOS subsystem stuff during boot. Much annoyance caused to the fans of pure DOS mode. 😀

dr_st wrote:

that's a given, since one of the official targets of WinME was reducing boot times

which was stupid IMHO, a PC boots once in the morning (in and ideal world) and you spend rest of the day actually in windows!
Am I crazy preferring a OS that sacrifices boot times for quicker once in? was one of the things that put me off WinME

bluejeans wrote:

I'm guessing you used the ticrates of timedemos to measure the fps?

What's a ticrate?

chinny22 wrote:

which was stupid IMHO, a PC boots once in the morning (in and ideal world) and you spend rest of the day actually in windows!

You think that's stupid? In Windows 8 they dramatically shortened the waiting period for F8 keypress during boot (so that effectively there is no chance in hell you would hit it unless you have a boot menu with a delay), just so they could shave one second off the boot time. Now that's lunacy. 😵

chinny22 wrote:

Am I crazy preferring a OS that sacrifices boot times for quicker once in? was one of the things that put me off WinME

No, but a lot of people and even reviewers focus way too much on boot time (because it doesn't take any brain or skills to measure), so that's one thing Microsoft tries to optimize.

To be fair, boot speed and actual performance have nothing to do with each other. That's not why ME runs a bit slower than 95. It just has more in it, that's all.

chinny22 wrote:

which was stupid IMHO, a PC boots once in the morning (in and ideal world) and you spend rest of the day actually in windows!
Am I crazy preferring a OS that sacrifices boot times for quicker once in? was one of the things that put me off WinME

Practically this never happened, you ended up rebooting multiple times. Either because even a simple installation required it (sometimes even forcing it, closing everything else without warning), or because crashes were very often/almost expected.

Jorpho wrote:

Yes, the SB Live cards would be the primary example, but I'm not sure you could call that "hardware synth/midi", considering those cards can use soundfonts stored in system RAM.

There needs to be something to play and manipulate those soundfonts, which is hardware on the card itself (according to the manual; it even says "onboard synthesizer") - likely baked into the main chip. That the sound samples are stored in RAM is not particularly important, there are tons of professional rompler-class synthesizers that do the same after loading their sound samples off floppy/hard disk/ROM cards (they sometimes use a back-up battery to keep the samples in RAM when the synth is switched off).

bluejeans wrote:

Going to run it on a pentium 133 with 48mb ram, only intending to use doom95 and vanilla doom.

Imo a Pentium 133 with 48MB RAM is already quite low for ME. I always tried to give ME at least something like 300+MHz and 128MB RAM, it really likes more resources.

If you want to compare ME to 95 (just the OSs by themselves), a Pentium 133MHz with that amount of RAM is not a good starting point. ME will struggle more due to the limited resources this particular specced rig has.

There certainly seems to be a lot of ME talk here today 🤣!

Funny story:

I was given a 486DX4-100 PC once, and it actually came with Windows ME on it 😳. It took forever to boot, but it was surprisingly usable and stable after that. Not as snappy as Win95, but definitely not as terrible as one would imagine either. I didn't run any games though, just basic file browsing and checking control panel settings.

Yeah, the speed of file browsing and checking control panel settings should be in the list of "must do" benchmarks in every review! 🤣

Definitely felt the pain going from 95 OSR2 to 98 SE on my daily use P200 with 32MB of EDO RAM, until I got more memory. I'm sure the performance difference is a lot less significant when you're talking 256-512 MB systems, but at the lower end you're starving.

firage wrote:

Definitely felt the pain going from 95 OSR2 to 98 SE on my daily use P200 with 32MB of EDO RAM, until I got more memory. I'm sure the performance difference is a lot less significant when you're talking 256-512 MB systems, but at the lower end you're starving.

I think you are correct about 256MB being ample for WinME 😀

I have less experience with 95 OSR2, but it seemed to work perfectly fast enough with 64MB while for ME it seems to not be totally enough. 192MB for ME should do the trick though (1x64MB + 1x128MB, running at PC-66). Personally I prefer to give Windows as much memory as I can reasonably give it.

I do like file browsing to be not too laggy, I think it's annoying for no good reason. Even doing some menu latency tweaks can give the "illusion" of having a more snappy file browsing experience (I've done particularly much experimentation when tweaking XP and it worked really well).

dr_st wrote:

Yeah, the speed of file browsing and checking control panel settings should be in the list of "must do" benchmarks in every review! 🤣

Wasn't there a benchmark for this? It benched mostly windows performance though iirc?
Using a faster harddrive will (obviously) also help and with this, it's more a matter of using a speedy harddrive than it is to use a large harddrive.