quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut You realize how little sense that makes, right? If you need beefier hardware to run it, then ipso facto it's less efficient.

Not necessarily. Compare file allocation tables and networking options between Windows 95 and Windows XP to name just 2 areas. Sure Windows XP has steeper system requirements than Win95. But do you remember how shit it was to defrag your hard drive in Win95 using FAT? To defrag the 4.3gb HD in my old pentium 2 system would take the better part of a *day* (even when the contents of the drive werent especially fragmented) and if you opened any application that loads into windows swapfile, disk defragmenter recognises that data has been written to the disk ipso facto, the contents of the drive are different and the entire process resets.

It was the lamest thing in the world to have disk defrag running for 4 hours straight and then you forget about that rule and open internet explorer because you want to check out the DVD specials on amazon.com. Boom. history page is written to disk. Disk Defragmenter cannot reconcile the fact that used space relative to free space on the drive has changed. It restarts from the top.

I used to dual boot Windows 98SE and Windows XP on the same system but now the 98SE partition is gone and its now my projects/wave dump drive. After using XP (and despite its *massive* flaws) it is just infinitely better than using Windows 98.

With Win XP disk defragmenter no longer takes about 10 hours to get through a 4gb drive. You can actually browse the internet whilst defragmenting, and it wont reset! This my esteemed friend is my idea of efficiency :P The faster CPUs, hard drives and memory help of course but I just think of how defrag used to annoy me and its all good again.

Last edited by Derivative on Feb-06-2007 at 11:09

id say stick with xp or for a better tomorrow, tiny xp (i'll check that one out and see if it does improve performance)

however, vista can suck my sweaty balls.

aero glass my arse.

___________________


Found Atlantis - Mixography [mix archive/mokumentary/my soul]?
i writed a song.

quote:

Originally posted by Derivative ... With Win XP disk defragmenter no longer takes about 10 hours to get through a 4gb drive. You can actually browse the internet whilst defragmenting, and it wont reset! This my esteemed friend is my idea of efficiency :P The faster CPUs, hard drives and memory help of course but I just think of how defrag used to annoy me and its all good again.

I see your point, but you are talking about a very narrow case. I think it would also be fair to classify that particular improvement as fixing a design flaw; it didn't really improve the performance of defrag OR foreground applications while running defrag, it just allowed you to do both concurrently. It's an improvement, but I wouldn't call it a performance improvement, and I also would point out to you that Windows XP's requirements were more modest than Windows 2000's and not drastically higher than Windows 95's. In fact, although the published requirements of WinXP were beefier than Win95, you could run it with older hardware and most of the time it would perform almost as well as Win95, sometimes better.

Vista is really a different beast. The implication of the post I quoted earlier was that Vista would perform better than XP on newer hardware, but would somehow perform worse than XP on older hardware. While this isn't completely impossible, it's highly unlikely and totally contradicted by current benchmarks and real-world tests/reviews. The fact of the matter is, given identical hardware, Vista will not perform as well as XP does at any given task, with the exception of initial boot-up.

Are there improvements in Vista? Sure. Are they performance improvements? Hardly.

___________________
My party schedule:
2009-02-21 - DJ Attention @ I'm So Popular
2009-06-18 - DJ Annoying @ People Need To Know Where I'll Be
2012-11-32 - DJ Insufferable ɸ Or At Least the Stalkers I Complain About
2048-06-66 - Spastic & Whocares ¶ Although I'm Actually Flattered
9999-45-81 - Tweaker Gimp ☼ I Probably Won't Even Go To This But I Have To Make Sure I Fill Up All The Available Space Here

I think we can all agree that at this point in time, XP is generally better, but we can't make an accurate or fair judgment until Vista gets settled in (so at least until next year) agreed?