>up to a year after release, many gamers still recommended Windows 98. Why? Mostly due to compatibility where things a Voodoo card and a Soundblaster running in MS-DOS were preferable for many titles, and this is something that simply wasn’t on offer with XP.
Actually, mostly since Wxp was slow as a dog compared to W98, because W9x still had direct control of the hardware rather than the sluggishness-inducing Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that NT has always had inserted between the OS and the devices.
W95 was noticeably faster than W98 was too, and both of course move like lightning-speed compared to W10 whose 64bit drags compared to W10-32bit, and W11 is more embarrassing as it continues to further slow with each update (almost every month now rather than only once per year), which makes W10 seem like it was a quite a bit less encumbered than W11.
userbinator · 37s ago
95 and 98 were roughly the same speed; any differences would likely be due to drivers. The main difference between the 9x and NT lineage is the former is actually a hypervisor for DOS VMs (and the GUI itself can be considered a DPMI application, running in its own VM) while the latter is a "full" OS with a very limited DOS emulator.
BirAdam · 1d ago
Well, in that regard, Win2K was also lighter than XP. A buddy of mine clung to 2K for years, refusing to move to XP until newer DirectX was required for some games.
Actually, mostly since Wxp was slow as a dog compared to W98, because W9x still had direct control of the hardware rather than the sluggishness-inducing Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that NT has always had inserted between the OS and the devices.
W95 was noticeably faster than W98 was too, and both of course move like lightning-speed compared to W10 whose 64bit drags compared to W10-32bit, and W11 is more embarrassing as it continues to further slow with each update (almost every month now rather than only once per year), which makes W10 seem like it was a quite a bit less encumbered than W11.