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diyAudio Moderator Emeritus
Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: The Netherlands
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Quote:
XP and '2000 are built on the NT kernel but with all the frilly doo-dads and add-ons reliability must suffer somewhat.
NT - straighforward, real 32 bit, reliable, not very hardware hungry. Not a gamer's OS though.
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Although you're right about the positive features of NT you're definitely wrong concerning reliability. W2K/XP are more stable and reliable with NT as a very good second. W98SE is OK but NOT to be compared with the NT variants. Windows Me really is worse than W98SE. Microsoft has admitted the memory bug and is not doing anything about it since the OS is obsolete now. When many programs are opened and closed again the memory is still claimed to be in use and the sytem will become slower and slower AND instable. W98SE does not suffer at all from these phenomenons, neither does any NT variant. NTFS file system is by far superior to FAT32 and gives more possibilities securing your system even on file level.
But concerning NT 4.0 : no USB/USB 2.0/Firewire support, no plug and play, no Dynamic DNS if you need that etc. Most important is that Microsoft stops making bugfixes, Service Packs and so on because thay want to sell XP. In other words: support will stop in the very near future or maybe they already stopped support.
NT has the disadvantage that buggy drivers can bring down the OS. The digital signing of drivers is a positive development in W2K/XP. And because of its age some features are missing like DirectX. It also does not like 2 of the same NIC's in the system etc. Small hardware errors cause blue screens whereas W2K/XP can withstand more. But NT lacks the Product Activation and the bloatware that comes with its modern brothers( positive ! ).
A lot of people are complaining of high system load in NT 4.0 ( a fact ! ) when harddisk is accessed. A tip: download the DMAcheck utility from Microsoft ( works from SP 5 ) and run it. Only running and enabling DMA access is enough. Every modern IDE/ATAPI harddisk is DMA ( Direct Memory Access, transfering data from HD to sytem without asking the CPU first ) capable and enabling this standard disabled feature will diminish CPU load@diskaccess from 70 % to less than 10 %. No cost, no disadvantages, no instability. With modern chipsets like Intel 810/815 etc. you can download Intel Application Accelerator instead. It'll do the same.
You'll be surprised if you try it.
Download of DMAcheck utility: http://support.microsoft.com/default...NoWebContent=1
Still run NT 4.0 Server with SP6a on my server and it'll stay there for many more years. I love the simplicity, speed and small size of this OS. Despite it's negative reputation it became pretty stable after SP5. But the damage was already done.
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It's only audio
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Win ME to XP ?
if upgrading...
