I have discovered that WinXP seems to be slower at handling communications than Win98. Bizarre as this sounds, it seems to be true.
I have a VB6 program that uses a VC6-written (by me) serial comms OCX. The OCX uses a separate thread to constantly monitor for incoming comms. The same code (in my programs) runs on all systems - there is no special compilation for different OSs. When run on a desktop PC running Win98 using a proper serial port, it zips through the comms nicely. When run on a much newer desktop running XP, also using a proper serial port, it is visually a touch slower. Baffled, I tried on my laptop running XP - it was also visibly slower. The laptop is still newer than the Win98 desktop. Now, the laptop doesn't have a serial port, so I'm using a USB-to-serial converter. This is why I'm not sure if it's a hardware issue, since it seems to be the same no matter what hardware is used on the XP machines (I also tried the USB converter on the XP desktop - same result). As a final test, after much faffing around, I got Win98 and WinXP both on the laptop as multi-boot. So I can now run the same code with the same hardware, and still the difference is noticeable. So it seems to be an OS issue - the only difference I can think of is that the VB program will be using core system DLLs under the hood (out of my control), which will be different for each OS. Has ANYONE experienced anything similar? Can anyone shed any light? -- -- Jason Teagle [EMAIL PROTECTED]
