About multitasking, what's best : AmigaOS, Linux, or Winblows XP ?

[Tomas]

AmigaOS.. I am no expert on the multitasking in windows and linux, but it does seem to give a smoother experience when multitasking under amigaos.
BeOS multitasking also seemed to work in a similar way to AmigaOS.

[Tomas]

ptek wrote:
So, the Amiga is better at multitasking than Linux ?

From how it feels to me, then yes. But i can only talk from a user perspective.

[Tomas]

MacOS and Windows 3.x dont have multitasking at all. They only pretend so.

I think he meant Mac OSX...

[Tomas]

Not true. Windows 3.1 did cooperative multitasking, and Windows95 did preemptive multitasking (like AmigaOS). Lousy deceptive marketing strategy it was of M$ to call Windows 3.1 just 'multitasking', suggesting it's being equal to any other multitasking OS.

No, win9x used cooperative multitasking, which was also the case with later version of classic mac os.

[Tomas]

Then why can I play music, play a game and download something at the same time on my old pentium 200 with windows 95?

You could do that on win3.1 as well. It just does not work as efficiently.

But i might be wrong... I read around and i find conflicting info, some say that win9x is cooperative while some says it has half implemented preemptive support. So i guess Wain is right..

[Tomas]

Nope you can't. You can switch between programs, but they pause if they 'run' in background. Believe me, I tried

Can it even be defined as having cooperative multitasking then? I used win 3.1 in the old days, but cannot recall that it was this bad. But then again that was many years ago.

[Tomas]

Actually, most of these appear to be from earlier versions of Windows. I don't think I've ever had a BSOD with Win2K, XP or the Vista betas.

I have sadly... and then they are usually worse than the standard crash and usually means i have to reinstall the OS.
Last time it happened was when installing a device using microsoft certified drivers.. I got bsod during boot and it would not even boot if i removed the device or booting in safe mode.
Another time i had a program freeze up the OS which meant i had to use the reset button.. Upon boot some file was missing/corrupted so that meant i had to reinstall again. People say that ntfs is pretty much safe from data loss on hard reset/power loss, but that is sadly not true in my experience.