calvin wrote:Yes, with little room to run other applications, and using any free memory inefficiently. Sure, XP might be using ~100 MB RAM, but it's not doing a good job at caching, preloading, or anything to actually make sure of free RAM. Free RAM is wasted RAM, and can be used and given up as needed.
As for 2000 SP4 vs. XP SP0, dear god, just run 2000. XP SP0 is awful in every way. SP1 made it a bit better, and SP2 changed a lot of stuff, but made XP tolerable. IMHO, stick with 2000 - it's actually vintage now and not unsupported semi-modern.
For me, Windows 2K is more unstable than Win98SE in my experience. For example, when I once dual booted Win98SE and Windows 2000: I installed the D-link Air 11MBPS PCI wireless card drivers, and it blew the kernel for both OS's upon reboot. Thus making them load with a bluescreen and no way to fix it without reinstalling Win98SE and Win2000 all over again. I tried dual booting Win98SE and WinXP on the same PC and installed the D-link drivers on XP and I did not get a BSOD on reboot and the machine worked well using both OS's and it was reliable, unlike Win2000. Also recently I installed Win2000 on a Dell PIII computer. The disk already came with Win2000's SP3 on it. So I downloaded SP4 to the PC and I clicked on the install file, but then I clicked cancel because I wanted to check something else out on the PC before installing SP4. I rebooted without installing SP4 and then Win2000 corrupted itself for no apparent reason. It said something about a system file missing. Also, I did not click too fast when exiting the SP4 installer, and plus the PC was a 1000MHz PIII with 256MB ram (plenty of power for Win2000) So, unlike popular belief, Win2000 is NOT a reliable OS, especially with drivers. I could never get my Promise ATA66 card to install Win2000 on a hard drive attached to the card. It did not matter what driver version I tried booting from floppy disk at F6. I still got a IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL Bluescreen in the middle of the Win2000 install and I could not finish the OS install. The last thing I don't like about Win2000 is that it is said to have poor memory management. Many people report seeing no difference in performance with 256MB or 512MB of ram on their Win2k system.
Why is XP SP0 so bad? I tried running it and also XP SP1. I found a surprising advantage of using it instead of XP SP2. The compatibility Tab function where 640X480 games play in full screen does not work on SP2 and SP3. Earlier versions of XP - (being SP0, SP1) CAN run old games in fullscreen 640X480! Plus - if you install XP starting with SP0, then update to SP1 and still use Windows media player 8, if you upgrade to Windows Media Player 9 you will keep all the older music visual effects that came with WMP 8. If you do a clean install with a SP2 or SP3 disk (which only includes WMP 9) you won't have any of the older WMP 8 visual effects, such as the rainbow one. One thing about WinXP SP3 is that you can no longer sort music files by "date modified" Please tell me, just how bad was XP before SP2? I don't remember SP0 and SP1 that much because I was using them before I was interested in computers. I Know that SP2 and SP3 of XP made it the most reliable, easy to use, legacy and forward compatible, and overall the best OS ever made! 😀 I still use and prefer it over Windows 7 or Linux. Still works and everything.
Dedicated Windows 95 Aficionado for good reasons:
http://toastytech.com/evil/setup.html