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Well, I finally got sick of Win98 and WinME crashing under tradestation so I
upgraded to XP during the weekend.
My machine is an 800Mhz dell inspiron 4000 with 192MB of RAM which is at the
light end for the unofficial RAM specs on ME. 256 would be better but I'd
got sick of the blue screen of death every time I'd been running a few
applications and loaded up a few TS windows.
I did a clean upgrade (used a W98 startup disk to delete the old windows
directory after saving my favourites. Took me about a day to get everything
back together and another day trying to figure out why my Lucent winmodem
runs at 32kbps under XP and 52kbps under ME. I've sent a bug report to Dell
and am using another modem for now.
So, what was the performance like. Well I turned all the fancy graphics off
to start with and selected "optimise for my applications" wherever I could.
I also went to http://users.aol.com/AXCEL216/axcel216.htm and was able to
speed up IE launching beyond my previous experience plus turn of the
annoying Microsoft Messenger. XP is great. I don't know why there were
problems with it being slow reported on this list earlier but ... they're
rubbish. If you have a reasonable machine, do a clean install and turn the
graphics off it should be faster than your old OS.
It boots faster than ME or 98 or slugs like Win2k and Nt. It loads programs
quickly and it runs them pretty well also. I can open 10 TS workspaces with
6-20 windows each and all it does is slows the screen refresh down when I
switch workspaces.
Now after 3 days doing all sorts of stuff including an entire day with TS
open and lots of old games .... no blue screen of death. I'll let you all
know in a week if the experience changes.
Thank you Mr Gates.
*** NO affiliation to Microsoft etc etc etc
John
PS ... if you can buy it on the educational discount (or your teenager can)
then its 66% off retail.
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