Quake II on a 68060 @ 50Mhz?

[Casper]

To be fair, Kenny, your PC system does sound a bit screwed up, considering I actually had WinXP (Pro) running on a 5 year old K6-II 350 with 128Mb (100MHz FSB) at one point.

Yes, I've used Windows XP on a similar setup (K6-II 450, 384Mb) and it was nowhere near the slowness KennyR describes. On that system IE6 loaded in less than 1 second, and that computer was several times slower than an Athlon. Actually, I tried a lot of Windows versions on that machine and XP (with the candy look disabled) was actually the fastest on it, faster than both Win95, ME and 2000, especially when running games.

I've run Win2000 on a 64Mb P133, and that was still faster than what Kenny describes.

Something must have gone horribly wrong with XP on that machine, I'd try a complete reinstall.

WinXP on my 1.8GHz Pentium IV 512Mb rdram is actually more responsive now than my old AGA A1200 with a 060 is, even with the candy stuff turned on (I still prefer AOS though).

[Casper]

For example, after booting, with no additional apps, my Win2K is using over 100M of ram according to task manager. What for, for f*cks sake? I have all non essential services turned off and the others set to load when required).
It's unreal. I can watch the CPU usage jump over 50% just typing into this window.

That's one of the great mysteries of Windows :-). And the more RAM you have to more it will use. My theory is that it does a lot of caching to memory of something. I've done a few tests and it seems like you get a lot of it back if you need it (i.e. you run something that's very memory intensive).

Watching the CPU usage in the task manager isn't a very accurate way to determine the load on your computer. Windows does a lot of maintenance stuff (such as defragging memory etc) on low priority when it's idle, so that's probably what you see. If you start using something more CPU intensive it will stop doing these things and devote more CPU time to that.

(my god, I'm starting to look like a windows fan boy :-) )