On 14 Oct 99, at 17:29, Lucas Wiman wrote:
> Sorry, but M$ didn't invent multitasking, and from what I've seen
> (I haven't seen NT multitask much) they have yet to implement it effectivly.
I'm most definitely _not_ Bill Gates's biggest fan, but I have to say
that Windows NT _does_ multi-task pretty well. In fact, in a SMP
environment, it's actually rather _more_ effective than linux, you
can (but don't have to) force particular threads to run on a given
processor. With luck, & provided there aren't _too_ many threads in
the "need CPU cycles" queue, this can give you a significant
performance boost, since the data you're working on might well be
still available in the CPU cache, even if you've been timesliced or
interrupted out since you fetched it - whereas pre-fetched data
sitting in the cache of another processor is useless to you.
I _don't_ understand Win 98 multitasking. I think they got it wrong,
Win 95 seems to me to work better. It's possible they were forced
into "fixing" it by demands made my multimedia. The specific problem
with Win 98 is that a thread running at higher priority is pre-empted
by threads running at lower priority far too often - far more often
than is needed to be able to respond to mouse clicks, etc.
Regards
Brian Beesley
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