Is it just me or does Windows2000 Pro suck big time for multimedia performance (games)?
All other things being equal, since I dont do too much big office work at home, should I consider Win XP, downgrade to Win98 or find a lighter` version of Win2000?
I ask this because I recently upgraded my machine (to a P4 Celeron 2000, new board and all, from P3-733), and nothing ever seems to turn-on quickly. Asides booting, I don`t see that much improvement from more than doubling processor speed. I guess it is security-related, Win2000 being renowned for being bug-resistant.
Any help would be most welcome. I will not go on Linux, though. Thanks!
(Note: Fresh-reinstall. No antivirus, firewall, or deviced related problems. Everything is compatible. Memory is not a problem either, over 350 megs. Videocard is of last year, 64 megs. Disk space is big too.)
Well in actuality, according to speed tests, Win2000 Pro is actually a good bit FASTER for games than Win98. Windows XP is fastest, but the differences are negligible. I run XP, it is an excellent OS, but 2000 is great too. If you aren’t noticing a speed increase in games after your CPU upgrade it is likely that the video card is holding you back. If your talking speed of the OS itself (in everyday apps like Word), it should feel a bit snappier, but nothing “life changing.”
use xp pro , its widely avail ;).
Its user friendly for the most part and actually quite stable. I used all of the others and so far xp is the best I would have to say.
Dan C, windows 2000 pro is meant mainly for servers, though running it on a desktop is fine, it has a lot of uneeded background services running which can hinder your systems performace. You may be able to improve your systems performace by shutting some of these services down. Take a look at this site for help Windows 2000 Professional and Server Service Pack 4 Services Configuration by Black Viper
Windows 2000 is notoriously slow. If you want to have your OS boot quicker, then XP is THE operating system for you. I run XP at home and 2000 at work. My work pc takes forever to arrive at the login screen but that is also due to it being on a domain. My XP arrives at the desktop in less than 10 seconds…and that includes me logging in. I am running a firewall too! XP is also really good for running legacy games that win 2k will not. I hear that installing service pack 4 for 2000 does improve the OS’s speed…but I haven’t tried it.
There is a large difference between Celeron chips and Pentium chips. Ill try my best to explain it without getting to technical.
First, the Celeron has a much slower front side bus. That means that the data moves from the RAM to the processor MUCH slower. Also, what makes a HUGE difference is the level1 cache (Memory actually on the processor). The more cache the better; the Celeron will either have little or none of this memory where as the P3 will have quite a bit. Processor speed is not a good indicator of performance.
I could go into a lot more detail and get much more technical but I’m sure no one wants to read more lol
Definitely upgrade to Windows XP. The only thing I don’t like about it is the fact that there are so many graphical effects tying up processor cycles. I turn those off, and it’s basically the windows 2000 core, with some multimedia extensions. The longest I’ve stayed active without needing a restart is 17 days with it, and if you’ve got any experience with windows 98, I never had that kind of stability there. With that kind of system, you should get good game performance. PM me if you need any info on tweaking XP or 2000 for speed, and also, make sure you’ve got the newest version of directX and drivers, of course.
If you download movies, music ect from sites like Kazaa it may slow your cpu down. Especially, if you are letting people file share on your cpu. There is a way to limit sharing. If you want you can pm me Dan C.
Personally, I never liked Kazaa I wind up getting problems on my cpu when I use it. I pefer Direct Connect.
NT Technology (Win2k, XP) is a bit of step backwards in hardware performance. If you can get away with using XP Home Edition that would probably be your best bet.
You said you have over 350megs of memory, I assume you mean RAM. This is a bit of an odd number. Do you have multiple chips? If so, and the chips differ in capacity, put the larger chip in the first slot.
LOL Landon, I spent a year and a half trying to write a linux type distro based on BSD, me and two of my CS friends from princeton were trying to write emulators for it (basically like wineX for linux) to use linux, windows, mac, x-box, anything we could get to run on the box. Wasn’t really going to be for public release. Basically was just a project to play with till I got done with college. Kind of based the GUI on Blackbox, which comes with linux, I like that one. We haven’t made much progress yet, we’re still workin on it though, I wish BSD had more software support, though.
In all sincerity I don’t understand how people can stand their computers crashing all the time and not working and doing all the stupid annoying shit that Windoze does.
Win2k works just fine for games. Maybe not quite as good as XP will, but it blows win98 out of the water.
Yeah the memory amount seems odd. You cant buy sticks in the 384 size, so i’m guessing you have an old 128 stick you matched up with a 256 stick? If so, are they similar quality/speeds?
All depends on what games you are talking about also when it comes to your video card and amount of ram. Win2k will eat 128 by itself, and then if you load it down with tons of ancillary yin yang plus play some newer games you will need 512.
Memory size on video card isnt the most important part, it’s the processor speed on it.
And yes, celery’s aren’t p4’s. Well they “sorta” are, in a similar relationship of a stallion to a gelding…
When it comes to software, I have yet to come across a situation that I would need to use linux emulation, or a linux machine for anything I do. I run BSD as a workstation, and still consult many high client ISP’s that use BSD for radius,dns,email,web,etc.
Realistically, there is more support and more development for Linux, but thats because of the marketing of it. I don’t hate Linux, nor dislike it … but after being around unix variants for nearly 8 years(commercial, and free variants), BSD’s have been far the superior.
Anyways … this is off a tangent and I apolgize for hijacking.
384 megs RAM, coming from 128 originallyt installed + 256 megs installed last year (same class of speeds, PC133, dunno about quality though, but 2 years difference between purchase and addon)
For the Celeron (from the box): 2GHz, 400-MHz System Bus, 128-KB L2 Advanced Transfer Cache.
Videocard: ATI Radeon7500 (64 Megs)
Linux: Oh my gawd. I hope it got better since my Unix shell coding days (1990). ;0)
Win2000 is indeed one tough mother. Hard to crash, but sometimes it happens when doing multimedia stuff, like video editing or big calculations stuff too (graphics). Never had problems with mainstream office related programs.
I`ll try all the tweaking before looking for hardware possibilities. I hope just closing down server related functions will do it. Makes sense.
Ill try all of the recommendations. When I tweaked earlier windows versions, taking out the functions that were unnecessary in my case, I saw good differences. Hope its the same with 2000.
Celerons have a veru limited amount of L2 cache RAM memory, which is the most expensive and fastest type of memory in a PC. This is why theu’re cheaper than Pentiums. Any operating system sucks on a celeron and all Graphic intensive aplications, like games, will have a poor performance.
