Amiga Multitask

[koaftder]

To be precise, Windows 3.x did multitask, at least on a 386 - however, only on the much more primitive, cooperative level (which the application needed to allow and some just didn't). Amiga OS offered preemptive multitasking from the beginning - a feature which required 10 years to reach the mainstream Windows platform (Windows 95).

It did on the 286 as well.

I think the preemptive multitasking feature of AmigaOS is mostly overrated. Without memory protection, preemptive multitasking doesn't result in a significantly better end user experience. It's all fun a games until a program goes off into the weeds and then the result is the same with either setup, i.e. the user gets to hit the reset button.

Love the Amiga to death but back in the day when I first got my hands on a 386DX/25 w/ 8MiB of RAM and 1MiB trident VGA board, I didn't miss the Amiga one bit. I'd go so far as to say that Windows 3.1 was more sophisticated than classic AmigaOS ever was. It certainly was more stable.

[koaftder]

Also people always say Win2000 is better than XP but unless you only had 64mb (a paltry amount in 2002 when XP was in use) it booted faster and thrashed the disk a lot less than 2000 on all the 100s of laptops I tried it on over the decade of sales of computers and laptops I managed. Don't ask me why.

XP was a lot more aggressive with the disc cache than 2k was along with a whole slew of other improvements. I never understood why so many folks clung to 2k.

[koaftder]

Win2k had much less graphical mumbo-jumbo - and yes, back in the K6-3 era this actually made a huge difference.

I never noticed a lick of difference in graphics performance moving away from 2K, certainly noticed the increased reliability though. Had a k6/2 400 with a sis 6326 w/ 8 meg ram and there wasn't a damn bit of difference in graphical performance even with XP's ugly ass fisher price window dressing. I think people make this stuff up or suffer from memory problems.

Please define this "mumbo jumbo" you speak of bogging down k63 boxen back in the day. Hell, XP even runs fine with PCI matrox cards. If your box was a slow poke, it wasn't because of the graphics.