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A lister asked me:
> What are the benefits of and differences in running W2K vs W98.
> Why do you say that " NT and W2k are MUCH MUCH MUCH better
> platforms to run realtime and mission-critical software on."
Windows ME is "Windows 98 with training wheels," according to one
noted PC expert. Windows 98 is Windows 95 with prettier cosmetics.
Windows 95 is just a fancy interface on top of DOS.
All these OS's share the same underlying structure, and the same
weaknesses. Their memory management is very poor, which is why you
often get better results if you use one of the "RAM saver" utilities
on the net. Those after-market products try to patch around the
inherent bugs and weaknesses in the DOS/W9x design. W9x also has
very limited process protection -- if one process goes haywire, it
can overwrite memory that belongs to other processes or to the OS.
That is Very Bad. There are other problems, but those are some of
the worst, and they can't be "fixed."
Windows NT was built on an entirely new foundation, and Windows 2000
was built on NT. W2k may *look* a lot like W98 or ME, but the
resemblance is skin-deep. W9x was a patch on top of a patch on top
of a 16-bit command interpreter (DOS). W2k, under the pretty Windows
face, has a FAR more solid design. It was built from the ground up
as a genuine operating system, with most of the things expected of a
modern operating system. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but they actually
did a pretty reasonable job on NT & W2k. (Mostly IMHO because they
hired non-Microsoft people to develop NT -- people who had built REAL
OS's instead of brainwashed-from-birth Microsofties who thought W95
was The Way It Should Be.) It still can't compare to a *real* OS
like Unix, in terms of its underlying architecture, stability, things
like that -- it's common for Unix systems to run for MONTHS or YEARS
without crashing or requiring a reboot -- but it's by far the best of
the Microsoft offerings.
NT and W2k are much more solid than W9x. In nearly 3 years of
running NT, I never had ONE SINGLE CRASH. NEVER. Sometimes a badly
written application (usually Tradestation) would get itself into a
bad state and would refuse to run until I rebooted the system, but
that's the app's fault. The OS was solid. After almost 3 years I
installed the SP6 service pack, and that together with 3 years of
accumulated cruft in the OS & registry combined to make the system
increasingly sluggish and troublesome. (It's well known that all
Windows OS's get "hardening of the arteries" after a while, and a re-
install can do wonders to pep up an old system.)
I don't have much personal experience with W2k yet, but the fact that
it's built on NT means it's starting out from a much better place
than any of the W9x OS's. That seems to be borne out by the comments
you often see here, saying that W2k was a MUCH more solid platform to
run TS2k or whatever.
See also http://www.purebytes.com/archives/omega/2001/msg00515.html.
Gary
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