> Well I went and made an impulse buy and got an IBM 660Mhz PC with a 13 Gig disk > , 128megs of ram, and windows 2000 `Professional' running on it, with an NTFS > file system. Apparently, just under the amount of ram and processor speed to > make a monster like win 2000 (or XP) run at decent speeds.
Hmm, the processor is more than fast enough for 2000 -- I ran it briefly on my 400MHz P-II, and it was speedy enough. Only went back to 98 on that machine when I bought this one (dual P-III) because I needed the 2000 license. The RAM might be a sticking point; the 400MHz box had 192MB, this one had 256 (since upgraded to 512). I'd say bung another 128 or 256 in there regardless of OS, RAM is cheap and the more of it the better. (Caveat: stay below 1GB for Win9x, it can slow down if you have more due to some interaction between cache size and management overhead.) XP I'd probably want a faster CPU for if all the visual effects were used -- the themes support can apparently suck around 2% off the top. > In this regard which windows might offer the best combination of welcome new > features and backward compatibility? Probably 98 or 98SE; Win2k doesn't do as good a job of supporting old DOS apps as XP, and even XP has the odd problem. At least on 9x you're running on an almost-decent DOS build. I'd be tempted to dual-boot -- the NT based OSes are a lot more stable than 98 in my experience, even though 98 is the most stable of the Win9x clan. Without going to 2k or XP, though, you do prevent yourself using various new stuff -- USB2 is one (USB1.1 is adequate for most things unless you're doing a lot of copying to/from USB drives), and I wouldn't bet on MS supporting DirectX etc. on 98 for too much longer. > Many old programs, even windows 9x > programs, do not speak nicely to the NTFS file system, The only programs for which that should be the case are those that manipulate the filesystem at a really low level; I've never come across an application for which it's a problem, and I've been running NTFS exclusively now for 3 years or so. FWIW I use a wide mix of old and new stuff -- Win3.1 releases of Visual Basic and Wordstar for instance. Only problem I can think of offhand is with *really* ancient DOS apps that need FCB support, and even 98 won't always run those. Digital Research's LINK-86 from the early 80s only runs on 98 from within the GUI (before Windows loads, no FCB support) and some FCB-based programs don't like FAT32. > and also can not > talk to the `hardware abstraction layer' of the newer NT based windows, to > access hardware directly. Hmm. Only device drivers should really be doing that anyway, otherwise you can end up with an unstable system -- NT does provide a lot of the lower level APIs though so again I can't think of any program I've seen for which that was an issue. Maybe old hardware for which no NT drivers are available. > There are weak dos emulations, some third party > tries at better ones (e.g., DOSBOX). Again, the NT-DOS emulation of DOS isn't quite as bad as is sometimes made out -- a lot of the benchmark apps run (Doom, 1-2-3, Flight Sim for DOS etc.), and in fact I've found that I can work on low-level DOS apps easily (I hack around on GEM, which is a DOS-based GUI which can do multitasking). VDMSound is a useful app to provide a decent SoundBlaster emulation. I'd agree that for heavy-duty DOS stuff apps like DOSBox might bring useful improvements though; I needed to use it to run Syndicate on 2000 IIRC, but not XP. Regards, Ben A L Jemmett. (http://web.ukonline.co.uk/ben.jemmett/, http://www.deltasoft.com/)
