T_Bone wrote:
I hated NT4, it was always wonky setting those damned things up.
Soundcards were hit or miss, same for video cards, service packs had to be constantly reinstalled everytime you make a slight configuration change that pulled an original file off the install CD, USB was ignored, CPU cache size had to be manually set. No device manager. Ugh, no fond memories of Nt4 here. :lol:
(Running it wasn't bad, but if anything "Murphy Lawish" happened to the machine it was a PITA to work on)
Out of the 50 or so workstations I set up with NT4, apart from USB, I had none of those complaints. Drivers were fine. Anything that required the original CD were settings I set when I first set the machine up (like say locale), SP reinstalls were last-resort and rare, and CPU cache size, well, big deal :-)
2000 and XP seemed exactly the same to me, I keep hearing people say they liked 2000 but hated XP, but most of the reasons are down to default settings that can be changed to accomodate the preference for 2000's defaults.
On about half of the XP setups I've seen, if one sets up task manager to have a systray icon and run minimised all the time, the icon disappears, regardless of the auto-hide settings (I like having task manager there!). The DMA issue of having to delete a registry entry if DMA goes wonky is just plain irritating, if trying to delete a locked file, "access denied" takes ages to appear, memory footprint is a good bit larger than Win2k, explorer memory usage is a lot larger than Win2k (regardless of how minimalistic your tastes are, the minimum mem. usage I've seen with XP is ~12MB), and Windows Product Activation (say no more). I'm sure there are other issues, I just can't think of them right now :-)
XP-64
One report I've heard (not sure how reliable the source is) says that even 64-bit optimised games with Win64 drivers isn't as good as normal XP on the same hardware. That's probably just a product maturity issue, a few SPs later and it'll be probably fine :-)
About Longhorn, I think it won't be anything new, they keep stripping out features to meet the 2006 deadline.
