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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JP Sullivan who wrote (57732)	4/29/2001 8:23:08 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

I can only speak to my somewhat limited personal experience. The machine I am using for "first cut" beta work is a 90 MHz ZEOS system that I purchased in 1994. It kind of sets the goal posts - it shows what problems will arise from running on old, slow hardware. That box has built in SCSI, early PCI with some problems, lots of things to trip up the unwary. All the hardware configured up no problem with the beta OS. Running 64MB RAM and the same mix of apps as I ran on Win2K, I see less page swapping, slightly faster response in several common productivity apps, quicker load times, and the networking operations are quite a bit better - I suspect they put some work into the TCP stack, which was kind of ugly under Win2K. Free memory in both systems stabilizes at around 3MB - as it should. Under heavy load Win2K drops close to 500K and the swap rate goes up. XP drops to about 1MB with a lower swap rate. Adding to make 128MB or 256MB (the max that box will hold) raised the threshold at which free memory dropped below 3MB, but otherwise did not change performance that much. The non-paged areas also seem to be smaller under XP. It looks to me like the base requirements for XP are about 4MB less than for Win2K with similar loads. My next step is to run the same tests at the other end of the spectrum - a 1.2GHz Athlon-based system with 512MB RAM and all new hardware. That lets me exercise newer stuff - 1394, large USB configurations, big graphics work. I don't plan on buying a P4 any time soon - still way too costly for what you get. If the RDRAM and base processor costs come down and MHz goes up I might try one.