XP pro as an OS

ShinkunoNamida · 05-12-2002, 01:57 PM

I've been running XP pro on my laptop for a good while now and i get some pretty fast boot times.. presumably faster if i went and changed winamp to be my shell (I'm not eactly sure you can do this.. i think you can o.O)

Just wondering what everyone thinks.

As opposed to win98se it should be faster, but require higher resources. But that should be fairly easy to cover.

Stine161 · 05-12-2002, 10:12 PM

well I dont know if I would go for windows XP because yeah it has lots of goodies added into it but all the error erports and **** like that also some hardware is not fully compatable yet. My self I would stick to 95/98 has all the tools I need and still has a DOS back end where as windows XP/2k has DOS bascly built into it.

Defiler · 05-16-2002, 01:55 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Stine161
well I dont know if I would go for windows XP because yeah it has lots of goodies added into it but all the error erports and **** like that also some hardware is not fully compatable yet.

You know you can turn error reporting off...

ShinkunoNamida · 05-16-2002, 03:11 PM

at this point if it's new it will work.. if it's old and it's not supported it probably never will be..

I am trying to find an am/fm radio tuner and the only i can find is for win95.. so it should work under 98.. doubtful under xp..

Most likely I'll end up using 98se

Cyanide · 05-16-2002, 03:24 PM

XP Pro is the an excellent operating system to use. You can turn off error reporting. Hell, you can make it so it never tells you a program crashed if you'd like. You can uninstall all of the extra software (Messenger, Movie Maker, etc). You'll have to go to a WindowsXP tweak site in order to figure it out, but it can be done. With the reintroduction of msconfig, you can speed up boot times as well (not that they aren't already the fastest).

As long as you know how to use/configure XP, it'll be the best choice for an OS. People who complain about error reporting and whatnot probably shouldn't use XP as they don't even know where to turn error reporting off.

*shrugs* It's all personal preference though.

Cy

ShinkunoNamida · 05-16-2002, 05:25 PM

my laptop is tweaked to look pretty.. meaning there is a whole bunch of extra crap running that i don't need.. and it still boots faster than most people that have used 98lite...

I'm very excited to see how fast xp will boot stripped down.. that is this weekends project

RaZor · 05-16-2002, 07:15 PM

how fast is the laptop? how do you think it would run on a slower system like a amd k6-2+ 475mhz machine??

ShinkunoNamida · 05-16-2002, 07:21 PM

it runs 1ghz on ac, and 733 on battery..

XP was specifically designed to be fast booting (look at the microsoft website it says so

)

And guess what.. they didn't lie this time.

I can't make any promises to you.. but if you stripped down xp i'd wager that you'd be able to boot in around 30 seconds with you cpu.. and you would probably boot from hibernate in much less (depending on how much ram really)

no guarantees... just a guess.. your hardware and everything will affect boot times

wizardPC · 05-17-2002, 12:55 AM

while it may _seem_ like a faster boot, my machine will lag to hell if I start firing up programs after I _think_ its already started up.

Granted, my machine is almost a year old, so that may be the problem (900 tbird, 512 PC133)

I have built 2 identical systems in the last 3 months for freinds of mine, using Athlon 2000 XP processors on the ECS K7S5A motherboard with 512 PC133, and XP boots AMAZINGLY fast. Like 20 seconds, including POST.

anyway, back to my point. I tried XP on the carputer, and they didnt like each other much. ME crashes maybe once every 2 months, XP crashed every day at least 3 times (in the carputer).

All depends on your hardware.

Cyanide · 05-17-2002, 01:21 AM

For reference, I had XP Pro installed on another computer in my apartment. It was a P2 400 with 256mb of PC133. It was fast. I noticed *no* slowdowns, long boot times, etc.

It's all about msconfig.

Cyanide

cenwesi · 05-17-2002, 05:22 AM

yes, but more of it has to do with hardware + cpu + memory

MP3DUB · 05-17-2002, 10:04 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by wizardPC
<edit>
anyway, back to my point. I tried XP on the carputer, and they didnt like each other much. ME crashes maybe once every 2 months, XP crashed every day at least 3 times (in the carputer).

All depends on your hardware.

this is what I ran into as well. 98se locks up occasionally, but xp crashed all the time on my hardware. and xp did boot up quickly, but no more so than 98, and the suspend to disk feature was quite nice for boot times (~10-15 seconds) but it took ~30-45 seconds to write everything to disk (win98 powers off in about 2).

Cyanide · 05-17-2002, 01:34 PM

Way to point out the obvious cen.

For a slower computer, as long as you disable all startup programs and unneeded services, you should boot pretty quickly.

I was surprised at how quickly my P2 400 would boot right after a fresh install. That is before I turned anything off. WinXP is a great OS.

Cyanide

vikrampant · 05-18-2002, 01:19 PM

I got XP running on my MP3 box as part of my entertainment center on a Dell Pentium Pro 200 with 128MB of RAM ... strip away all the useless stuff and drop a good sound card (SB Live 5.1) and it is amazing ... I basically have WMP open all the time and can access the shared drives from any other machine in the house... XP is legit, if you get driver support :-)

Andrew Chappell · 05-18-2002, 05:12 PM

My copy of windows xp hasn't crashed (as in fully locked up and needed a restart) since october when I upgraded my copy of windows me. The pc is close to two years old (gateway p3-750, 512mb ram e.t.c.) and it boots in well under 1 minute and the pc is full of tv / radio card, scsi card, lan card, sb live e.t.c. If I take the expansion cards out and do a fresh install i can get a boot up of 20 seconds including post. That is quicker than it takes to boot up from hibernation!

My duron 900 also runs xp and has been 100% stable since it's upgrade. It is one of the few microsoft products I have been absolutely happy about buying... If I get the duron running in the car then it will almost certainly be xp based - the cleartype font smoothing on an LCD looks amazing!

Andrew