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Why continue to use Windows 9x?


DukeBlazingstix

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You seem to be the master of generalization, which createthread() in our virtual address space leaks memory, please be more specific.

As long as I remember CreateThread()/_beginthread() leak some memory on Win9x this is why Apache has the following compile switch:

PMT_PTHREAD

This MPM is based on the PREFORK MPM and begins by forking the desired number of child processes, each of which starts the specified number of threads. When a request comes in, a thread will accept the request and serve the response. If most of the threads in the entire server are busy serving requests, a new child process will be forked. This MPM should be used on platforms that have threads, but which have a memory leak in their implementation.

With regard to ntfs or fat, both have there own advantages disadvantages. disk size,if you like to multiboot,non(sequential) write capability,if you like control from dos,if you have software to defrag mft, all come into the equation.

The important advantage of the NTFS is however that since it's journaled it's way more reliable than FAT. Also it has some cool features like additional streams that can be used by antiviruses (for example kaspersky) to store checksum data to avoid scanning the same files twice.

Both types allow only the os to disk write and in my many years of experience fat(32) has never let me down.

There are linux ext2 users that could say the same thing of ext2 because they have a stable setup: that doesn't change that with ext2 or fat32 you risk losing more data if the O.S. crashes or the computer is suddently powered off.

This forum has come across people like you before, it is all about choice, we have made our choice,you have made yours. The only difference being that you are posting in the forum of the particular os you have not chosen. Do they not talk much in their?

If you didn't notice this thread is named "Why continue to use Windows 9x?" so I didn't come here accidentally saying that NT-based OSes are better without reasons just to p*** other people off. I answered in this thread because somebody asked why windows 9x should still be used and I gave my reasons not to use it, because it's unsupported and very unreliable.

If you prefer performance over stability it's your preference however that doesn't change the fact that NT based oses are years ahead in terms of stability.

_beginthreadex is preferable over _beginthread and CreateThread? the reason behind this is simply that the C runtime library was first invented long before multithreading was available and as far as I am aware is not os specific.

Regarding performance http://www.devhardware.com/c/a/Software/Win98SE-vs-WinXP/

I know you will say disable this service disable that service, but I could also minimise my 98 setup and boy would it fly.

MS made a lot of claims about XP, it is in the interests of marketing to make something new appear far superior.

Creating a barebones 98 install with any programs preinstalled is a snip, it is easy to copy to any machine and then run hardware detect ren setupx/4.dll etc.

I do not think i will be buying a copy of XP and then purchasing additional ram for my 98 systems that run just fine with what is already there

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ok i crashed 2k by taking some ram out going from 96 to 48 or something because i needed a 64mb stick

Have you tried running memtest86 after removing the ram stick?

nlite is easy to use but there are those utils do some of what nlite does for nt5x+ for 9x

Well we were talking about the easiness of a XP install versus a 9x install. Using nlite that does everything is still easier than having to mess up with different utilities.

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_beginthreadex is preferable over _beginthread and CreateThread? the reason behind this is simply that the C runtime library was first invented long before multithreading was available and as far as I am aware is not os specific.

_beginthreadex and _beginthread are preferable over CreateThread especially when using the CRT included with windows 98 because pre-7.0 versions had weird memory leaks. This doesn't happen on the CRT 7.0 included on XP that has been mostly rewritten (to make it more thread-safe).

Regarding performance http://www.devhardware.com/c/a/Software/Win98SE-vs-WinXP/

I know you will say disable this service disable that service, but I could also minimise my 98 setup and boy would it fly.

Like I said before if you prefer performance over stability is a different matter. However if you actually test recent hardware, that has legacy drivers for 9x and a much more recent drivers on XP probably you would get different results.

Most PC users would prefer reliability against slightly better performances.

MS made a lot of claims about XP, it is in the interests of marketing to make something new appear far superior.

Because it is in fact superior. Maybe in some cases it isn't as fast as windows 9x however in terms of stability is light years ahead.

Creating a barebones 98 install with any programs preinstalled is a snip, it is easy to copy to any machine and then run hardware detect ren setupx/4.dll etc.

You can do that with XP too (with a tool called preinst) but I prefer reinstalling from scratch with the driverpacks so I get up-to-date drivers in each install.

I do not think i will be buying a copy of XP and then purchasing additional ram for my 98 systems that run just fine with what is already there

Well like I said if fine for you means only better performance it's all another matter.

Edited by Francesco
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The important advantage of the NTFS is however that since it's journaled it's way more reliable than FAT.
That's a feature created to make crashes efficient. Your system shouldn't crash to begin with. And if you claim XP is nearly uncrashable, it's pointless.

Most people also seem to forget that NTFS is a proprietary file system, its implementation known only to M$ as a trade secret, while FAT is a partially patented file system whose inner workings have been documented all over. With NTFS, you need M$ to read your files, it partially owns them. With FAT32, I own my files and have full control over them.

that doesn't change that with ext2 or fat32 you risk losing more data if the O.S. crashes or the computer is suddently powered off.

Only the data currently being processed, which on my computer is only the browser cache.

If you didn't notice this thread is named "Why continue to use Windows 9x?" so I didn't come here accidentally saying that NT-based OSes are better without reasons just to p*** other people off. I answered in this thread because somebody asked why windows 9x should still be used and I gave my reasons not to use it, because it's unsupported and very unreliable.
Indeed, why use Win9x, NOT why NOT to use it.
And as you may know often newer drivers mean better performance on games.

Games belong on consoles. And if you really need your Oblivion fix on the PCs, you can run it with an older 32 MB graphics card while still looking awesome.

You can create a Windows PE CD to access your NTFS partition, fix the registry, restore your windows backup etc.
Great, a large boot CD-ROM, when a tiny DOS environment works just fine on Win9x.
Better performance than 9x was one of the things that MS continuosly advertized when XP came out

Marketing at work, M$ needing to sell their newer product. Moving on.

The common user usually doesn't need many of the services in XP.
Yet another reason to not use XP: it's bloated!
With nlite you can do a completely automated install cd of 2000/XP with applications, updates and, if you use driverpacks, all up-to-date drivers already integrated.

Doesn't beat ghosting.

On the recent games almost always you get better performance and more reliability with more recent drivers.
Those newer drivers come with newer graphics cards.
You can build it from a XP cd using bartPE.

I tried that before. Never again, it's a mess. Booting to DOS is much better and easier.

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to Francesco:

Nvidia cards are not supported, but Ati cards are still supported as long as i know (i have Ati Radeon 9800 and i downloaded universal driver - downloaded files for winxp and 98 was identical - month ago?)

If WinPE is an application which has 800 megs (and maybe updates) i can remove all malware with less than 800kb of tools manually in few minutes. No file scans which takes long time, i just reboot to dos mode.

That winXP runs better on newer hardware is myth. I have P4 with 2Ghz processor and 512Mb of ram with winXp in my office. Also i tried XP at home on 800Mhz processor with same ram. Overall system performance was better at my home computer. Then i returned to Win98 and performance is much better. (i tried it with 3d game)

If Microsoft advertized that XP shall have better performance... it could, but it is not affected by hardware but by new features which are implemented to system (throught DirectX and other similar modules).

Today all what is supported by Xp si althought supported by 98's community, or is it not necessary for me as user (some parts of XP - applications which are included in it).

What is not well known that many drivers for w2k or xp are suitable for w98se, even when hardware manufacturer does not offer 9x support :) I use WDM driver designed for winXP on my sound card and on myTV tuner. Test showed me that these are the best. Althougt they do not have legacy support i have dos drivers active and i can use them in dos anytime i need.

Also i dont prefer performance. I prefer compatibility. What i found out is that it goes hand in hand with reliability and performance. Most trouble with reliability was always caused by applications, not only in win98 but also in higher versions...

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That's a feature created to make crashes efficient. Your system shouldn't crash to begin with. And if you claim XP is nearly uncrashable, it's pointless.

What if your PC power suddently goes off? What if the IDE/SATA driver messes up and starts writing everywhere?

You know that on FAT32 all the files in the directory structure are stored together? What happens if the power goes out and windows is updating for example the "last access" date of a file in a directory? The ENTIRE DIRECTORY could get corrupted and without journal all the file references would be lost.

Most people also seem to forget that NTFS is a proprietary file system, its implementation known only to M$ as a trade secret, while FAT is a partially patented file system whose inner workings have been documented all over. With NTFS, you need M$ to read your files, it partially owns them. With FAT32, I own my files and have full control over them.

And? That doesn't change the fact that there are plenty of partition managers and recovery utilities that work perfectly on ntfs (partition magic, acronis (that is linux based), easyrecovery etc). And now linux has fully working read/write drivers for NTFS.

Only the data currently being processed, which on my computer is only the browser cache.

Everytime windows accesses a file it updates the Last Access entry in the directory structure for the file, during some boots windows back-ups the registry, etc.

Indeed, why use Win9x, NOT why NOT to use it.

If there are people giving PROs about 98 there has to be somebody to point also at the CONs, don't you think?

Games belong on consoles.

http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_...pic_id=24525221 what about these games? Are they all coming to consoles?

And if you really need your Oblivion fix on the PCs, you can run it with an older 32 MB graphics card while still looking awesome.

Oblivion looking awesome on a 32mb card?!? Have you even tried running it on a 32mb card? Pratically you see only very-near things. Enemies and other stuff remain unseen unless you get very near to them. It's almost unplayable.

Great, a large boot CD-ROM, when a tiny DOS environment works just fine on Win9x.

Since linux now has a full ntfs read/write driver you can use a nice linux bootdisk if you don't want a large boot cd-rom

Marketing at work, M$ needing to sell their newer product. Moving on.

Marketing? I'd really want to see recent benchmarks of win98 with legacy drivers (because most hardware producers don't support 98 anymore) and xp with recent drivers.

Yet another reason to not use XP: it's bloated!

But that bloat can be easily disabled from the services console. Can you say the same of the hidden win9x processes?

Doesn't beat ghosting.

Even XP/2k can be ghosted. But what about all the up-to-date drivers that can be integrated in a XP install with the driverpacks?

Those newer drivers come with newer graphics cards.

What?

I tried that before. Never again, it's a mess. Booting to DOS is much better and easier.

A mess? With just the XPE plugin you can have an almost completely working windows XP (where IE, explorer and many other applications actually work) all booting from CD.

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The important advantage of the NTFS is however that since it's journaled it's way more reliable than FAT.
Only in certain situations; since NTFS is more complex it has a larger 'critical window' - where interrupted writes can corrupt the entire filesystem. What if that interrupted write happened somewhere in the journal file? On FATxx the amount of read/write activity done is far less than on NTFS, and the critical window is small.
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to Francesco:

Nvidia cards are not supported, but Ati cards are still supported as long as i know (i have Ati Radeon 9800 and i downloaded universal driver - downloaded files for winxp and 98 was identical - month ago?)

This is why I said "On the recent games almost always you get better performance and more reliability with more recent drivers. On 9x ATI video cards after the 9800 and all nvidia cards that came out in 2006 are not supported. Same thing for recent nforce/ATI chipsets: they're not supported."

If WinPE is an application which has 800 megs (and maybe updates) i can remove all malware with less than 800kb of tools manually in few minutes. No file scans which takes long time, i just reboot to dos mode.

WinPE is not an application it's a sort of live version of XP where you can add and run plenty of applications. With some plugins you can enable plug&play, explorer/IE and many other stuff to make it work like a nearly-full XP environment booting from CD. It may take more to boot however you can use plenty of stuff you can't use on DOS (you can even get some games like quake3 running on winPE and this says it all).

That winXP runs better on newer hardware is myth. I have P4 with 2Ghz processor and 512Mb of ram with winXp in my office. Also i tried XP at home on 800Mhz processor with same ram. Overall system performance was better at my home computer. Then i returned to Win98 and performance is much better. (i tried it with 3d game)

Maybe because your office PC has plenty of cheap integrated hardware, bloated antivirus etc?

If Microsoft advertized that XP shall have better performance... it could, but it is not affected by hardware but by new features which are implemented to system (throught DirectX and other similar modules).

It is mostly affected by drivers and OS features (like XP's prefetch, that is why XP usually gets higher scores on winstone benchmarks). After all the NT kernel doesn't have much higher added overhead compared to the 9x kernel.

Today all what is supported by Xp si althought supported by 98's community, or is it not necessary for me as user (some parts of XP - applications which are included in it).

All? What about applications like Diskeeper 11, Office 2003/2007, NETFX 3.0, visual studio 2005 etc? Even firefox 3.0 is going to drop 9x support.

What is not well known that many drivers for w2k or xp are suitable for w98se, even when hardware manufacturer does not offer 9x support :) I use WDM driver designed for winXP on my sound card and on myTV tuner. Test showed me that these are the best.

Those are usually very rare exceptions.

Althougt they do not have legacy support i have dos drivers active and i can use them in dos anytime i need.

If you need dos support you can still keep a 9x partition for dos stuff like games etc. However on XP there are projects like dosbox that are getting better and better with each version.

Also i dont prefer performance. I prefer compatibility. What i found out is that it goes hand in hand with reliability and performance. Most trouble with reliability was always caused by applications, not only in win98 but also in higher versions...

But an OS that can't be crashed or hanged by most applications is a step above the others, don't you think?

I've had my xp laptop running for entire months without a single shutdown (because I use hybernation) on 98 probably I would have been forced to reboot a few times in a week because of crashes or ram being eated up by leaks.

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The important advantage of the NTFS is however that since it's journaled it's way more reliable than FAT.
Only in certain situations; since NTFS is more complex it has a larger 'critical window' - where interrupted writes can corrupt the entire filesystem. What if that interrupted write happened somewhere in the journal file?

Well if the journal gets corrupted there should still be the filesystem structure intact so nothing weird should happen.

On FATxx the amount of read/write activity done is far less than on NTFS, and the critical window is small.

Most of the writes are cached so NTFS's critical window isn't much bigger. However you still have to be 2x times unlucky by having both a journal corruption and a filesystem structure corruption together.

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real dos is still way better than dosbox,

dosbox is too slow

There are some alternatives, like a sound blaster emulator for XP. I never tried them but some of my friends told me that they're pretty fast. If you have problems you can still keep a real dos partition for games.

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im starting to wonder why dont you edit your posts why do you post consecutivly about previous posts and all over the place rather than in just one post which comments on all the previous

even with sound blaster emulator you still need to be able to have another emulator for games cause they probably still wont work properly.

i have a creative vibra 128 for a reason and i still have some sound blaster 16s around anyway

Edited by awergh
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im starting to wonder why dont you edit your posts why do you post consecutivly about previous posts and all over the place rather than in just one post which comments on all the previous

That's because there's a limit in the number of quotes in a single post. (this is why I was forced to use bold instead of the quote block in some previous answers)

even with sound blaster emulator you still need to be able to have another emulator for games cause they probably still wont work properly.

i have a creative vibra 128 for a reason and i still have some sound blaster 16s around anyway

I don't think that VDMsound (the sb emulator) is made to work in conjuction with other emulators. It's made to enable audio on dos games that work fine under xp (and there are many of them).

However I prefer dosbox that even if doesn't have a complete sb32AWE emulation (like any heavy dos gamer would expect) you can tweak the speed and have a better game experience because on newer systems many games' speeds get messed up: for example I tried playing stargunner and quake on dos and they were going way too fast (even with slowmo). With dosbox I just tweaked a few settings and they start running fine.

Edited by Francesco
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What if your PC power suddently goes off?
Then ScanDisk runs and fixes whatever is broken, which is hardly ever significant stuff.
What if the IDE/SATA driver messes up and starts writing everywhere?

Then it's a bad driver. Duh.

What happens if the power goes out and windows is updating for example the "last access" date of a file in a directory? The ENTIRE DIRECTORY could get corrupted and without journal all the file references would be lost.
Oh please. I'll lose just that one date. What a disaster... Again, ScanDisk does the job.
And? That doesn't change the fact that there are plenty of partition managers and recovery utilities that work perfectly on ntfs

By reverse-engineering, which on something as important as the file system, is not perfect. The actual inner workings aren't known, and things could break before you know it.

Everytime windows accesses a file it updates the Last Access entry in the directory structure for the file, during some boots windows back-ups the registry, etc.
Yet I haven't had any problems in 8 years that ScanDisk couldn't fix.
If there are people giving PROs about 98 there has to be somebody to point also at the CONs, don't you think?

Not in a thread that asks for the PROs, because CONs are off-topic.

http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_...pic_id=24525221 what about these games? Are they all coming to consoles?
Irrelevant. That doesn't disprove that games belong on consoles.
Marketing? I'd really want to see recent benchmarks of win98 with legacy drivers (because most hardware producers don't support 98 anymore) and xp with recent drivers.

You're bypassing what the actual comparison is about, which is OS performance, not driver performance. So the drivers have to be the same. Don't claim that XP is more performant when you're talking about your shiny drivers.

But that bloat can be easily disabled from the services console.
Software should come with good settings. I shouldn't have to turn off all the bloat, it should come without it! Defaults are important! Bad excuse.
Can you say the same of the hidden win9x processes?

There are no 'hidden' Win9x processes. They are all needed. Only 7 on my system at the moment that are not applications.

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But what about all the up-to-date drivers that can be integrated in a XP install with the driverpacks?
Again, why bother with that when you can just ghost a hard drive that already has all the drivers?
A mess? With just the XPE plugin you can have an almost completely working windows XP (where IE, explorer and many other applications actually work) all booting from CD.

Hah! If only it was that easy...

But an OS that can't be crashed or hanged by most applications is a step above the others, don't you think?
Yes and no. For one, it doesn't prevent you from using badly-coded applications.
There are some alternatives, like a sound blaster emulator for XP.

All this nonsense is really a laugh. Thousands of people migrating to XP, noticing that M$ removed all of DOS, and then people make all sorts of utilities to get it all back.

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