Volitaire,

It may be harder to write code for the HAL, but I believe the benefits are reaped.

I would like to think that ME will be the last 9x kernel. I'm pretty much sick of it.

Voltaire:

"It's harder to do stuff. I know what i'm talking about."

Well, I guess I don't. I mean, at least during my MCSE classes, the term "It's harder to do stuff" never came up when talking about the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer-the thing that there seems to be a hang-up on). But, here is what I have gathered from classes and using these machines. It would seem that the only thing limiting NT for gaming was the lack of DX upgrades past DX3 and the fact that the OpenGL drivers were usually not so hot for games (insert MCD vs ICD discussion here :)). Seeing as in the DOS days people were programming to the hardware directly via the drivers you needed the direct access. The only problem was that you would have a ton of different hardware/driver combos that a machine could have. But with DX, you could just program to DX, and DX would work directly with the drivers. This way, a programmer would work with a common hardware interface that would work on many systems at one time. I mean think about it, Q3 works great in NT as long as you have SP3 or above (DX3) and a decent video card/driver set. And the main reason was the HAL was used was to prevent errant user mode processes from sucking the life out of the hardware resources with eternal crashing. This is why the NT4 executive loads the HAL in the first of its 5 load phases. I would think that with the X-Box using PC hardware it would use similar PC drivers and therefore be easily ported to the non-gaming Win2K OS.

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Regards,

clutch

Win2k was meant to replace the 9X kernel OSes entirely, this was the plan until Beta2 of Win2k (NT5 build 1877) when they figured out how they didn't have enough time. Unfortunately they couldn't build in all the cool features and driver support that they wanted to in the time they had left before they needed to ship. MS missed their ship schedule by around a year trying to get 2000 totally perfect. This the reason for Whistler (as far as I can tell) is to try to get a the cool things they just didn't have time to implement in Win2k. WinME will be the last of the 9X kernel OSes, if for no other reason than its costing MS way too much to continue to develop and support the two different OSes.

I have yet to see anything from MS claiming that Win2k was designed for businesses only. Its true that Win2k wasn't primarily intended to be used for gaming, but I know that many incompatibility bugs with games were specifically targeted and fixed. MS makes far less off of individuals who are purchasing (or stealing it off the web...) Win2k for personal use, they're more concerned about having business systems up for 24x7 since there'll be far more companies actually purchasing it.

MS knows that Win2k is huge, they've placed the entire company's future on it. That's why it's so great.

So is whistler really that cool? I love Win2K. The only thing that has crshed it hard for me was PowerDVD (ver. 2.55). It did it once and that's been the only prob I have had in the last 2.5 months. Is whistler faster? Does it have more gadgets? What are we instore for in changes?

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Regards,

clutch

go here:
http://www.winsupersite.com/


it give a little info on Windows Neptune and Whistler, not to mention WinME beta3