The Mac definitely had the best OS of the 90s. I couldn't stand using Windows. It wasn't until Windows 2000 that Windows finally got out of the Stone Age. But if it weren't for game support, I'd drop Windows in a second and probably switch to Linux. Too many viruses and bloated resources.
- Status
I'm guessing the people who keep bashing Windows ME never had it, or are just cattle and repeat what everyone else says. This is common human behavior.
Windows ME was the best version of Windows 95. It was much more stable than Windows 98, and only a tiny bit slower and bigger. It still blew up much more than Windows NT/2000, but less than Windows 98.
Even when Windows 95 came out, it was pathetic compared to OS/2. Apple's crap was even less advanced, with a pathetic OS that did a terrible job of multitasking. OS/2 was by far the most advanced, and it has a better GUI (Workplace Shell) than anything Microsoft has come out with since. Everything was an object, and was handled exactly the same way as everything else - no exceptions. It was very easy to use, extremely fast, and robust. Not only that, it was, and is, the best platform for running DOS applications - even better than DOS.
But, truthfully, Windows 95 did suck less than WFW 3.11, but it would have been hard not to. WFW 3.11 was not only ugly, counter-intuitive, and lacking features like pre-emptive multitasking, it blew up constantly.
Windows ME was the best version of Windows 95. It was much more stable than Windows 98, and only a tiny bit slower and bigger. It still blew up much more than Windows NT/2000, but less than Windows 98.
Even when Windows 95 came out, it was pathetic compared to OS/2. Apple's crap was even less advanced, with a pathetic OS that did a terrible job of multitasking. OS/2 was by far the most advanced, and it has a better GUI (Workplace Shell) than anything Microsoft has come out with since. Everything was an object, and was handled exactly the same way as everything else - no exceptions. It was very easy to use, extremely fast, and robust. Not only that, it was, and is, the best platform for running DOS applications - even better than DOS.
But, truthfully, Windows 95 did suck less than WFW 3.11, but it would have been hard not to. WFW 3.11 was not only ugly, counter-intuitive, and lacking features like pre-emptive multitasking, it blew up constantly.
[citation][nom]segio526[/nom]You know, as much as people complain about Vista, I didn't have any issues with it.[/citation]
Let me guess, you mainly had newer hardware? Some of us had hardware, eg. printers, webcams, video input cards etc., that didn't work with the new OS. Vista required more resources for the same tasks compared to XP and wasn't intuitive for some things eg. networking, managing your library or searching.
Let me guess, you mainly had newer hardware? Some of us had hardware, eg. printers, webcams, video input cards etc., that didn't work with the new OS. Vista required more resources for the same tasks compared to XP and wasn't intuitive for some things eg. networking, managing your library or searching.
"I'm guessing the people who keep bashing Windows ME never had it, or are just cattle and repeat what everyone else says. This is common human behavior."
Nope, I was installing AutoCAD and office systems like Banyan Vines at that time and doing support/upgrades.
Win95 was none too good, ME was a disaster. Every available byte of memory counted - memory was expensive. Since Win95 and later ME required more memory for the OS they had performance issues. I kept as many offices as I could at 3.11, properly set up it was stable enough and the move to 95 gained little to nothing at great expense in training and hardware. The ones that listened and later went directly to 98 or 2000 with new hardware fared much better than the ones that upgraded to 95 and ME.
Nope, I was installing AutoCAD and office systems like Banyan Vines at that time and doing support/upgrades.
Win95 was none too good, ME was a disaster. Every available byte of memory counted - memory was expensive. Since Win95 and later ME required more memory for the OS they had performance issues. I kept as many offices as I could at 3.11, properly set up it was stable enough and the move to 95 gained little to nothing at great expense in training and hardware. The ones that listened and later went directly to 98 or 2000 with new hardware fared much better than the ones that upgraded to 95 and ME.
[citation][nom]dooa[/nom]"I'm guessing the people who keep bashing Windows ME never had it, or are just cattle and repeat what everyone else says. This is common human behavior."Nope, I was installing AutoCAD and office systems like Banyan Vines at that time and doing support/upgrades.Win95 was none too good, ME was a disaster. Every available byte of memory counted - memory was expensive. Since Win95 and later ME required more memory for the OS they had performance issues. I kept as many offices as I could at 3.11, properly set up it was stable enough and the move to 95 gained little to nothing at great expense in training and hardware. The ones that listened and later went directly to 98 or 2000 with new hardware fared much better than the ones that upgraded to 95 and ME.[/citation]
All hogwash. If memory was your primary consideration, 95 used less than 98. If stability was, ME was more stable than 98.
I recently set up a Windows 98 SE machine, and got so frustrated with it, I bought another copy of ME from eBay. It's not night and day, but it's better. I'm not crazy about System Restore, as someone else mentioned, but it's easy enough to disable.
WFW 3.11 was not stable, at all. It could not protect applications from each other, and networking was anything but elegant. There was little reason to use it, since OS/2 ran all the Windows 3.11 apps, and had much more protection, and supported virtual memory and preemptive multitasking.
All hogwash. If memory was your primary consideration, 95 used less than 98. If stability was, ME was more stable than 98.
I recently set up a Windows 98 SE machine, and got so frustrated with it, I bought another copy of ME from eBay. It's not night and day, but it's better. I'm not crazy about System Restore, as someone else mentioned, but it's easy enough to disable.
WFW 3.11 was not stable, at all. It could not protect applications from each other, and networking was anything but elegant. There was little reason to use it, since OS/2 ran all the Windows 3.11 apps, and had much more protection, and supported virtual memory and preemptive multitasking.
- Jul 26, 2008
- 3,873
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The problem with Vista was the kernel period. The way it handled memory and allocation was so horrible I could write a paper on it. It was one of those "good ideas" that had horrible execution, thankfully they did a much better job with Windows 7.
Two examples of how bad Vista's memory handling was.
First was application display memory (Windows Display Manager). Each application had its own area of memory that was more or less a giant frame buffer that loaded all the visual resources used to display that application. Vista kept a ~copy~ of each applications buffer inside the WDM itself, so in effect each application used twice as much memory for visual display, once inside the application and another inside WDM. This is not GFX card memory but actual system memory used to hold raw display data before it gets fed to the display driver.
Second is how caching works with paging file and superfetch. Superfetch is just a helping / indexing daemon, its job was to populate the windows data cache with as much data as possible. The paging file was used to hold pages of least-used memory when more main memory was needed for something else. In the NT6 security model you can not execute applications from cache or paged memory, and cached memory can not be returned to the free pool until its been zeroed out. An application needs to be copied from cache memory into a free portion of main memory before it can be executed, you can't just reallocate cache memory into free memory with an application inside it and expect it to execute.
Usually this copy is near instantaneous as memory to memory copy's are rated in the Gb/s, provided there is a chunk of free memory to copy it into. With vista it would consume ~all~ free memory in its efforts to get free memory down to 0, meaning no scratch memory available for apps to be copied into. Instead the NT6 (Vista) memory manager would page out cached or allocated memory to make free space to copy the program / data from cache to a region of "newly" freed memory prior to execution / access. This meant the system had to wait for the HDD to write the paging out to the page file prior to the memory copy of the application your wanting to use. Because HDD speeds are significantly slower then memory the system appears to "stall" during this time. Windows couldn't just "dump" memory allocated to cache because it was waiting on a copy operation from cache to free memory, there would of been a chance of zeroing out the memory you wanted to copy. If you want to see this in action just start vista and load a few web sites and open a few folders then look at the windows task manager performance tab. Total / Cached / Free and the page file size usage. Once "free" gets to under 10MB (should happen in a few min) try to open something and watch the page file start to grow. What Vista is now doing is paging out areas of memory to make space for your app.
All this headache goes away if you just manage to keep an area of memory free for scratch use that way programs can be copied directly from cache into free memory for execution without having to wait for a paging operation. This is actually what they did with Windows 7, if you check you'll notice it always has a decent chunk of free memory available. You don't need much maybe 200 MB or so, maybe 500 MB if your frequently load large apps, but it makes a world of difference in execution speed.
Two examples of how bad Vista's memory handling was.
First was application display memory (Windows Display Manager). Each application had its own area of memory that was more or less a giant frame buffer that loaded all the visual resources used to display that application. Vista kept a ~copy~ of each applications buffer inside the WDM itself, so in effect each application used twice as much memory for visual display, once inside the application and another inside WDM. This is not GFX card memory but actual system memory used to hold raw display data before it gets fed to the display driver.
Second is how caching works with paging file and superfetch. Superfetch is just a helping / indexing daemon, its job was to populate the windows data cache with as much data as possible. The paging file was used to hold pages of least-used memory when more main memory was needed for something else. In the NT6 security model you can not execute applications from cache or paged memory, and cached memory can not be returned to the free pool until its been zeroed out. An application needs to be copied from cache memory into a free portion of main memory before it can be executed, you can't just reallocate cache memory into free memory with an application inside it and expect it to execute.
Usually this copy is near instantaneous as memory to memory copy's are rated in the Gb/s, provided there is a chunk of free memory to copy it into. With vista it would consume ~all~ free memory in its efforts to get free memory down to 0, meaning no scratch memory available for apps to be copied into. Instead the NT6 (Vista) memory manager would page out cached or allocated memory to make free space to copy the program / data from cache to a region of "newly" freed memory prior to execution / access. This meant the system had to wait for the HDD to write the paging out to the page file prior to the memory copy of the application your wanting to use. Because HDD speeds are significantly slower then memory the system appears to "stall" during this time. Windows couldn't just "dump" memory allocated to cache because it was waiting on a copy operation from cache to free memory, there would of been a chance of zeroing out the memory you wanted to copy. If you want to see this in action just start vista and load a few web sites and open a few folders then look at the windows task manager performance tab. Total / Cached / Free and the page file size usage. Once "free" gets to under 10MB (should happen in a few min) try to open something and watch the page file start to grow. What Vista is now doing is paging out areas of memory to make space for your app.
All this headache goes away if you just manage to keep an area of memory free for scratch use that way programs can be copied directly from cache into free memory for execution without having to wait for a paging operation. This is actually what they did with Windows 7, if you check you'll notice it always has a decent chunk of free memory available. You don't need much maybe 200 MB or so, maybe 500 MB if your frequently load large apps, but it makes a world of difference in execution speed.
mrmez
Splendid
- Aug 15, 2006
- 2,852
- 2
- 21,460
Hahaha. Thats pretty good. I miss the old days when Mac and MS fanboys could still be mates and have a laugh with each other. Seems like everybody just hates these days.
On a side note, Windows will always be my first love, but she was always too moody and temperamental. As an earlier post said:
"Windows 98 - It's sucks even less
Windows ME - We're so very sorry
Windows XP - Tons less suck!
Windows Vista - Oops, our bad
Windows 7 - at least it's better than Vista"
Its that variability factor. You never quite know how a new MS OS will go. Its hit or miss.
On a side note, Windows will always be my first love, but she was always too moody and temperamental. As an earlier post said:
"Windows 98 - It's sucks even less
Windows ME - We're so very sorry
Windows XP - Tons less suck!
Windows Vista - Oops, our bad
Windows 7 - at least it's better than Vista"
Its that variability factor. You never quite know how a new MS OS will go. Its hit or miss.
[citation][nom]demonhorde665[/nom]actually if it wasn't some theifing bastard i'd still be running win 95. i wanted to do a dual boot with winxp and win 95 (for older games) but when i went to look up my old win 95 copy all i could find was the book , apoperntly some one that was living with us a few years ago made off with the disk. now if i could just get win7 i could at least do a dual boot with it and win xp. wouldnt get my old games working but oh well... wish i could get baldurs gate 1 and 2 running ok on this sytem but currently the BG games dont like winxp much throw a dualcore cpu on it and BG games just go bonkers.[/citation]
There's an XP patch for BG2:Throne of Bhaal which should make it playable. I finished the game with no problems a month ago under Win7 x64 and a dual-core machine.
There's an XP patch for BG2:Throne of Bhaal which should make it playable. I finished the game with no problems a month ago under Win7 x64 and a dual-core machine.
stromm
Distinguished
- Jun 23, 2004
- 162
- 0
- 18,680
I'm on a contract for a steel company. They still have about a hundred Win95 machines, 30 Win98 and (I can't believe it's true), 10 OS2/Warp systems. All because the data interface cards and software are ISA and Microchannel and to replace them they'd have to purchase new equipment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. They even have a few systems in storage as backups.
It turns out, this practice is very common in the industrial "manufacturing" field.
It turns out, this practice is very common in the industrial "manufacturing" field.
JonathanDeane
Distinguished
- Mar 28, 2006
- 1,469
- 0
- 19,310
[citation][nom]stromm[/nom]I'm on a contract for a steel company. They still have about a hundred Win95 machines, 30 Win98 and (I can't believe it's true), 10 OS2/Warp systems. All because the data interface cards and software are ISA and Microchannel and to replace them they'd have to purchase new equipment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. They even have a few systems in storage as backups.It turns out, this practice is very common in the industrial "manufacturing" field.[/citation]
Eventually when the hardware is too old to find replacements for... A lot of companies will turn to virtualization, the trick is figuring out how to interface the old hardware that is being controlled by the old software.... Always a fun time to be had there lol
Eventually when the hardware is too old to find replacements for... A lot of companies will turn to virtualization, the trick is figuring out how to interface the old hardware that is being controlled by the old software.... Always a fun time to be had there lol
[citation][nom]palladin9479[/nom]The problem with Vista was the kernel period. The way it handled memory and allocation was so horrible I could write a paper on it. It was one of those "good ideas" that had horrible execution, thankfully they did a much better job with Windows 7.Two examples of how bad Vista's memory handling was.First was application display memory (Windows Display Manager). Each application had its own area of memory that was more or less a giant frame buffer that loaded all the visual resources used to display that application. Vista kept a ~copy~ of each applications buffer inside the WDM itself, so in effect each application used twice as much memory for visual display, once inside the application and another inside WDM. This is not GFX card memory but actual system memory used to hold raw display data before it gets fed to the display driver.Second is how caching works with paging file and superfetch. Superfetch is just a helping / indexing daemon, its job was to populate the windows data cache with as much data as possible. The paging file was used to hold pages of least-used memory when more main memory was needed for something else. In the NT6 security model you can not execute applications from cache or paged memory, and cached memory can not be returned to the free pool until its been zeroed out. An application needs to be copied from cache memory into a free portion of main memory before it can be executed, you can't just reallocate cache memory into free memory with an application inside it and expect it to execute. Usually this copy is near instantaneous as memory to memory copy's are rated in the Gb/s, provided there is a chunk of free memory to copy it into. With vista it would consume ~all~ free memory in its efforts to get free memory down to 0, meaning no scratch memory available for apps to be copied into. Instead the NT6 (Vista) memory manager would page out cached or allocated memory to make free space to copy the program / data from cache to a region of "newly" freed memory prior to execution / access. This meant the system had to wait for the HDD to write the paging out to the page file prior to the memory copy of the application your wanting to use. Because HDD speeds are significantly slower then memory the system appears to "stall" during this time. Windows couldn't just "dump" memory allocated to cache because it was waiting on a copy operation from cache to free memory, there would of been a chance of zeroing out the memory you wanted to copy. If you want to see this in action just start vista and load a few web sites and open a few folders then look at the windows task manager performance tab. Total / Cached / Free and the page file size usage. Once "free" gets to under 10MB (should happen in a few min) try to open something and watch the page file start to grow. What Vista is now doing is paging out areas of memory to make space for your app.All this headache goes away if you just manage to keep an area of memory free for scratch use that way programs can be copied directly from cache into free memory for execution without having to wait for a paging operation. This is actually what they did with Windows 7, if you check you'll notice it always has a decent chunk of free memory available. You don't need much maybe 200 MB or so, maybe 500 MB if your frequently load large apps, but it makes a world of difference in execution speed.[/citation]
Yes, Vista's memeory management is inferior to Win7's, but you got a few things wrong.
DWM has one copy in system memory, one in graphics memory (not two in system memory) and at that only for GDI programs. Win7 got rid of the system memory copy and just uses graphics memeory.
"In Windows Vista, every GDI application window accounts for two memory allocations which hold identical content – one in video memory and one in system memory." http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/04/25/engineering-windows-7-for-graphics-performance.aspx
You are also wrong on SuperFetch and paging. Cached memory is directly accessible by applications. SuperFetch keeps frequently used programs in memory so they can start up faster. Vista can indeed dump SuperFetch for memory intensive applications. Take note of total percentage of memory used before opening and after closing a program that uses a lot of memory. Using the paging file extensively only happens if you actually start running out of RAM. How SuperFetch works and myths about it and what is labeled as cached memory is explained here: http://www.osnews.com/story/21471/SuperFetch_How_it_Works_Myths
Yes, Vista's memeory management is inferior to Win7's, but you got a few things wrong.
DWM has one copy in system memory, one in graphics memory (not two in system memory) and at that only for GDI programs. Win7 got rid of the system memory copy and just uses graphics memeory.
"In Windows Vista, every GDI application window accounts for two memory allocations which hold identical content – one in video memory and one in system memory." http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/04/25/engineering-windows-7-for-graphics-performance.aspx
You are also wrong on SuperFetch and paging. Cached memory is directly accessible by applications. SuperFetch keeps frequently used programs in memory so they can start up faster. Vista can indeed dump SuperFetch for memory intensive applications. Take note of total percentage of memory used before opening and after closing a program that uses a lot of memory. Using the paging file extensively only happens if you actually start running out of RAM. How SuperFetch works and myths about it and what is labeled as cached memory is explained here: http://www.osnews.com/story/21471/SuperFetch_How_it_Works_Myths
alextheblue
Distinguished
- Apr 3, 2001
- 3,078
- 106
- 20,970
[citation][nom]dgingeri[/nom]virtual machines work so much better for this. Trust me. I have virtuals for Win 3.1, Win95, Win98, and WinXP. They work great for older games. The Win98 virtual works better for Warcraft 2 than the WinXP does.[/citation]
If it's a DOS game, DOSBox is often a better solution - it provides nearly perfect emulation of not only the DOS enviroment, but also of the old hardware of that era.
If it's a DOS game, DOSBox is often a better solution - it provides nearly perfect emulation of not only the DOS enviroment, but also of the old hardware of that era.
- Status
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