DrX

No you need a third party DRIVER. And there's one floating around that's free, albeit illegal I think because it's a modified Fraunhofer. But why pirate it, it costs like 10 bucks! -Rev

Better sound support... Let's recap. Windows 9x used a native MME driver for sound events. Remember mmsystem.dll? Windows 2000 was different in the sense that it had a native DirectSound driver but that its implementation had certain problems with stuttering and clipping on many sound cards that had mediocre drivers. In XP, the DirectSound engine is completely efficient. I'm talking you can overload the crap out of it and it won't stutter unless you're using an SB live or some other crappy sound card with crappy drivers... I love my Santa Cruz and even though my VIA 686B southbridge has problems with sound they were apparently completely ironed out in XP so long as I didn't use an SB live.

You guys are deluding yourselves. Windows 2000 Professional is designed for a business environment, with more stability in mind over speed. I don't care what you say, for games and *most* applications, Windows 9x was faster, albeit more unstable and buggy and riddled with problems that made it absolutely ridiculous to run if you favored a stable OS over a minimalistic one. Windows 2000 has a lot of problems, even most users now are observing this with the SP2 issues that plagued games and VIA systems, not to mention the fact that it had crappy as hard drive controller support, limiting transfers to ATA 33 with a patch to up this to ATA 66 in SP2. DOS VM support was minimalistic and buggy, the "Application Compatibility Packs" seemed to support every program and game BUT the ones that I had, I couldn't run Need for Speed 3, or 4... Took me WAY longer to load a Counter-Strike map while running Windows 2000, and games in DirectX overall had a slower feel to them and weren't as responsive. Windows XP changed all that. Now that it's targetted for people that are actually supposed to be playing games instead of those that are supposed to be working or writing reports or doing telemarketing or whatever the hell it is that corporations do, you can expect much more support from developers and Microsoft itself. They'll work hard to make sure that games get a high priority of support, stability and efficiency will now have even trade offs, not to mention all the *little* things that make XP a much nicer OS to have. I'm not talking about the pretty GUI (or crappy?) or whatever it is you 2000 users seem to think us XP people like about the OS, I'm talking about functionality here, like taskbar grouping, system tray icon hiding, auomatically calculating what programs I use most and keeping those accessible for me, automatic up[censored], better sound support, automatically synchronizing the system time with an atomic clock server without using a third party application, native sound in DOS games, WAY faster bootup and shutdown times, fast user switching, CLEARTYPE FONTS (HELL YEAH!), better ACPI handling (doesn't bog down your system), native support for VIA chipsets... all in all, many many things that help me and others like myself have a much more enjoyable and productive experience in an OS that doesn't sacrifice speed for stability and seems to look purty doing it too. I have used Windows 2000 Professional before, for MANY months, and for those of you still intent on using 2000 because you're afraid of change, to those I say:

I can't enable trilinear filtering in Quake 3 Arena for some odd reason... it just keeps resetting to Bilinear. I have the 21.81 drivers and a GF2MX which Im positive supports trilinear filtering. What's the deal?

Quote: Microsoft has even shown that XP is slightly slower (not enough to be noticable) than 2000 in some tasks. What a load of crock. Prove it. I posted my source, now you post yours.

No one said the startup and shutdown process was 45% faster. Did you read the article?

This is NOT A FINAL PRODUCT! The one I got was a beta and wasn't labeled as such, I ended up corrupting my RAID array and had to reformat. I didn't know the problem was Diskeeper 7 at the time and proceeded to reinstall it only to have my system corrupted again. I have traced the problem to the boot time defrag feature. I suspected my RAID controller was the culprit and that maybe Diskeeper 7 wasn't compatible with it, so I eliminated my RAID array and used a single hard drive on the motherboard's IDE controller. Reinstalled Diskeeper 7, and bam, registry hive corruptions UP THE WAZOO. DO NOT USE THIS PRODUCT Stick to PerfectDisk, Speed Disk 2002, Diskeeper 6 and other programs. All have been proven to work great in XP. I can only hope that none of you suffered what I did, it's devestating losing 50 gigs of data after my RAID-0 stripe broke the first time around. I had SO MUCH STUFF!!11 :::criez:::

Overclocking, no. Using an HPT370, yes. But then I disabled it and used the onboard IDE controller instead and it still corrupted my data. NEVER HAPPENED WITH ANY OTHER DISK DEFRAGGER BEFORE!

Hello? Anyone home? You can turn off the new logon screen and make it like Win2K. Also all the new "dumbing down" features can be turned off too. Windows XP isn't just about looks it's 45% faster than all the other versions of Windows including 2000 and Me, and that's been proven by an independent testing facility. Just check out the article on NeoWin.net.

I have XP... Should I install the 4-in-1s? I read somewhere that I shouldn't because XP has all the stuff built into it and the 4-in-1s are now obsolete.

I think that Home Edition will run games much better because Professioanl is cluttered with all this crap for Enterprise networks that is worthless to home users and takes up valuable RAM and CPU resources. Home Edition will be trimmed down and optimized to run applications and games. But I like professional. I just would like to know what services are running on the Home Edition so I can disable the ones that I don't need under XP. I already read a tweak guide that shows the minimum number of services you need to play games and stuff but I'd still like to know how Home Edition is set up so I can emulate it on Pro. Any ideas?

NTFS isn't supported in XP Home? You must be kidding me... And come on remote desktop? I'm pretty sure "Remote Assistance" is, isn't that kind of the same thing?

I have no proof of my claim of course but neither do the people that claim Home is identical to Pro minus a few applications. Removing SMP support requires changes in the OS kernel and that means that Home and Pro already have different kernels, I would wager that there are more kernel enhancements in XP Home for home users. Something to think about.

I think there are certain key changes at the kernel level to optimize running applications over network performance. Also I suspect that it's not just 1 or 2 services we're dealing with but somewhere along 20 that aren't necessary because they deal with domain controllers and "smart card" (makes me want to go out and buy one but... no) readers. I really do believe it will affect frame rate because Millennium ran games faster than 2000 or XP Pro did. I wouldn't think Microsoft would release an update to an operating system that would run games SLOWER than its predecessor... that certainly wouldn't make for impressive PR. -drx

I used partition magic in Win98 to mess a bit with resizing my drive's unallocated space. Win2K now sees my drive's total size as 21 gigs instead of 27, even though I only made it 8 megs unallocated. The system is FAT32. I ran scan disk, check disk, did everything, no go. In a last attempt effort, I ditched 98 entirely and upgraded to a dynamic disk in hope that it would recognize the real drive size. Still, 21 gigs. Any ideas?