[GHz]

Hi,

Months after XP's release, I finally decided to take the plunge and upgrade from Win2k Professional to WinXP Professional. Overall, I'm impressed... especially at the way-improved boot times and polish of the GUI. However, I am disappointed at XP's poor multitasking performance compared with that of 2000. In my spare time I make mods for FPS games, and I need to run MSVC 6.0 (my compiler) along with a few instances of the FPS game I'm working on. In 2000, this isn't much of a problem. I can usually have a few game windows open with minimum resolution settings, along with my compiler, and the performance is fine. I try to do the same thing in XP, and as soon as I launch one game window, the whole system slows down. Looking at the task manager, I can see that XP is letting the game hog all resources. I tried playing with the thread priority, but it had little or no effect (sometimes it just crashed my system).

My question is this: Has anyone observed this problem? Is there any way to improve the multitasking environment of XP? If not, I'll have to go back to 2000

[NTGAMEMAN]

have you tried out XP sp1 beta build 1068 yet ?

[Four and Twenty]

i like the task handling in .NET server better than 2k or xp. XP was a little slow.

[GHz]

No, I haven't tried SP1, but I don't see how a service pack could change something like this. I also don't have .NET server, and I don't know much about that anyway.

[CyberGenX]

I had that problem, among others, in XP with Adobe Premiere 6.02, it would just crawl and take up about 300MB RAM. 2000 would only take 30MB and run great! Went back to 2000, screw the cartoonish, bloated, linux wannabe, reminds me of Window ME, 5,000 services running, security leaking, Home user OS.

[Admiral LSD]

2000 is for masochists.

[Julian Mehnle]

Quote:

2000 is for masochists.

Oh, what a well-founded statement.

BTW: XP is for teletubby lovers.

[Admiral LSD]

Quote:

Oh, what a well-founded statement.

Well, given all the crap I had to put up with during the year or so I used it I fail to see how anyone other than a masochist can like it.

Quote:

[B]BTW: XP is for teletubby lovers.

I actually have that pic as the wallpaper for my local Administrator account because I find it so funny. The new GUI isn't that bad, it's better than the old one (which was revolutionary back in 1995 but by 1999 was seriously showing its age) any day of the week.

[Julian Mehnle]

Quote:

Originally posted by Admiral LSD
[B]Well, given all the crap I had to put up with during the year or so I used it I fail to see how anyone other than a masochist can like it.

I have no significant problems with Win2k. But I could tell you a story about XP... After I installed it on a secondary partition on my home PC, my Win2k wouldn't hibernate any more. After I re-replaced the WinXP boot sector and startup files (NTDETECT, NTLDR, etc.) with the Win2k ones, hibernate worked fine again. Of course, WinXP didn't boot anymore. So I deleted the WinXP partition.

Quote:

[B]The new GUI isn't that bad, it's better than the old one (which was revolutionary back in 1995 but by 1999 was seriously showing its age) any day of the week.

I find the XP GUI too patronizing and disorienting.

[Admiral LSD]

Quote:

[B]I find the XP GUI too patronizing and disorienting.

When I first saw it, I thought that very same thing but at the same time I made a conscious choice to actually give the thing a go. That was over a year ago, you can't get me to switch away from the thing now. Granted, the default blue them isn't much chop but if you don't have a wallpaper that matches either of the other two then it isn't that bad. The Silver them is the best of the three XP ships with but if you don't like that theres always http://www.themexp.org

[Julian Mehnle]

It's not only about themes. In fact, it's almost not about themes at all.

It's more the way Microsoft continuously keeps reorganizing things like the control panel or the start menu. It's tailored to newbies far too much by now, and with every new OS release it's getting "worse".

Of course that's just my opinion. But if you need to do 15 clicks instead of 8 or 10 just because Microsoft thinks you should use wizards for *everything* instead of giving you just a plain dialog with a handful of options, then it can hardly be an improvement for all the more experienced users (aside from the fact that with each new OS release you have to learn almost from scratch how to do so many "simple" things like adding a user account to the system or configuring the network).

In principle, I like the idea to simplify user interfaces so they're as easy to use as possible (think Star Trek), but I don't think that Microsoft is exactly heading into that direction (although I grant them their goodwill).

[Admiral LSD]

Funny thing is, I hardly ever see the Wizards because I still do things the same way under XP as I did under 2k thus bypassing many of the "traps" M$ have set to launch a wizard. For instance I set my network up during the initial install (my RTL-8029 network card is automatically detected so I guess that makes it a little easier) so no Network Setup Wizard and I create all my user accounts in the Computer Management Console so no User Account wizard. The only two wizards that really bothered me are the "Add your .NET Passport to Windows XP" and "Add Network Place" wizards but given I don't have to run them all that often they're not that bad.

[one_2_three]

You could do what I do and disable all of the eye candy. I don't mind it being there, but I don't need it myself. It's more directed to make the "newcomer" users feel safe using their PC.

[Admiral LSD]

But I like the eye candy, its the best thing to happen to the Windows dekstop in years.