Re: PRIMES comparision

From: f0dder (f0dder_spicedham_at_flork.dk)
Date: 07/26/04 

Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 19:41:11 +0200

vsp wrote:
> I don't know about your setup, but I've got only 128MB RAM and
> XP works pretty well...it's quite resposive for upto 8 different
> apps open simultaneously, beyond that the paging service starts
> thrashing and performance becomes abysmall...
>
Humm, I just found it a bit sluggy with 128 megs - at least with
winamp, a bunch of internet browser windows, visual studio, MSDN,
and a couple of command prompts. Additional RAM gave the added
benefit of a larger filesystem cache, which is nice when you do a
lot of file searching (something tells me I should organize things
better ;-) )

I liked moving to 512 megs of ram, and (while pretty much a luxury,
not by any means necessary, and somewhat overkill), moving to 1024
megs and turning off pagefile support totally was nifty too :-)

>> I haven't run any hard timing tests and they would probably be
>> in favour of win98 -
>
> Very probable indeed. Not only can you use instructions like CLI/STI
> under 98, it has fewer background services and it does almost no
> authentication, no journalling overhead, not as much of a micro-
> kernel system as XP etc. etc.
>
I wonder how noticable the difference is on even "moderate" systems,
though... the athlon700 here feels plenty fast with XP. I wonder if
the added complexity of NT slows down regular application code, most
of the threads in the system are in idle state most of the time...
And the added authentication, journalling etc. are so advantagous
that I don't mind them slowing down things a bit :)

> As I said XP is quite responsive for me with all 'eyecandy' on and
> only 128MB RAM. Strange that with 256MB RAM and minimal 'eyecandy',
> your XP is still slow...
>
Well, that's just as I remember it - 128 felt sluggy, 160 was
reasonable, and 256 was fine. 512 meant a lot less paging when
running huge stuff, and a gig means no paging at all (even when running
huge games like Far Cry). But okay, if you're only going to do office
work and a bit of web browsing, 128meg could probably do the job fine.

> done too many virus experiments have we?
> :)) ;)
>
Heh, I wonder why you would think that...