I’m sure the debate over XP has been done a million times but I’d like some objective opinions over claims made by MS, rather than a love-hate debate…if that’s possible!
Test Bed 1: Two PC’s…identical. 1.8GHz Athlon XP, 40Gb ATA133 hard drive, 256Mb PC266 RAM. Mobos used: K7SOM+ and latest Bios. Test Bed 2: EPIA-M all in one VIA mobo with 933MHz C3 CPU. Hard drives and RAM as above. CD used in each case was a 48x CDRW. Broadband DSL via USB2.0 in each case. Comparing 98SE and XP:
To install 98 on a newly formatted hard disk, install and then apply every update from the Windows Update site took just under 60 mins. 1/2hr to install Office 2000SBE, updates and patches, Nero5.5, Winamp and one or two small apps. To get XP to this stage took just over 4 hours.
MS claim that XP will start up faster and run apps quicker than any previous OS. On both my test PC’s, XP was vastly slower. More reliable? W98 is still running and has been for over a week without a single problem. TheXP PC has given me at least 20 errors requiring a reboot, then asks to send a report to MS. Rebooting gives a message saying that Windows has had to recover from a serious error.
Shutting down, the 98 machine is off in under 7 seconds, the XP PC takes at least a minute to shut down. All my apps which flew under 98 now take longer to load and work very slowly. The hard disk on the XP machine is littered with tmp files after switching between one or two apps. Networking the 98 machine took 1 min and 1 reboot, and immediately networked to my other 11 PC’s with no tweaks. The XP PC refused to network unless I created a Setup disk and then ran it on all the other machines and rebooted them each 3 times. Much of my software will not run underXP and as for my scanner…..!
HDD remaining for data under W98? 34Gb. Under XP? Just under 29Gb. Faster, better, more reliable? How do MS justify these claims?
