Best OS?

[Buzzard]

I was reading an Article in a Magazine that showed the best gaming hardware combinations for your budget. It had machines from $1000 - $2000, $2000 - $3000 etc. What i thought was strange was that each machine had Windows 98 on them even the $18000 beast machine. (this is in Australian dollars by the way).

Is Windows 98 still the best OS for games? Have we really not come that far? What about Linux for games? What is Linux?

[tricktx]

hi buzzard welcome to sysopt.

Im sure this topic has been covered before so try doing a search for it if you want.

But to answer your question Win98SE is in my view the most stable,easy to use OS available along with Win2000 but that has more bugs. I cant stand XP and millenium crashes every 10mins on my other machine. So although its 4/5 years old. Win98 is still regarded as the best OS in the uk anyway,like you say £300-£2000 machines are still supplied with win98 insted of XP.

Richard

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Do a search for a thread called best OS for gaming / games, all will be answered in there my friend

--Jakk

[AllGamer]

well in general i agree with tricktx and that Magazine review.

Win98 it's simply the fastest booting OS, and stable when you only use it for Gaming.

Win98 is not as stable for running business software, but sure runs games the way they were ment to be played

I use Linux or Win2K for my business needs

[Bigjakkstaffa]

i'll throw in another vote for 98 /2k

Although due to 98 being quite unstable and often being unable to recover from program faliures etc resulting in bluescreens ive migrated to the much more stable 2k, which is just like XP but without all the extra junk and cr@p, however unlike in 98 it is known for 2k to have some compatibility issues with older games wheras 98 will play pretty much anything. Only thing is 98 cant handle high amounts of ram very well (unless you tweak it) , so as games begin to demand more RAM, 98 will die off...

--Jakk

[AllGamer]

Originally posted by Bigjakkstaffa
Only thing is 98 cant handle high amounts of ram very well (unless you tweak it) , so as games begin to demand more RAM, 98 will die off...

true true.... that seems to be the only downside of Win98

[Ankerson]

I use WINME for Older Games and Win 2k for everything else.

I do run XP Pro, but I like Win2k better.

[Giblet Plus!]

I have ME. No stability problems, and it runs games very nicely. I might get myself 2K and dual boot, because ME has crappy multitasking.

[optic_pro1430]

To run very old games...

You'll need to the lowest, Windows 95! A FAT16 Partition, with an old sound card with DOS Drivers with a mouse driver.

[mousepotato2]

...hummm....
...from my limited views, 98SE runs MORE of the games than ME or 2K....2K is MUCH more stable than 98, 98SE is a little more flakey than ME but with 768meg RAM on my ME OS (and a LOT of tweeking) I can run about 90% of the games I run off of my 98 OS with less problems...then there's some older games I can run in a DOS shell using ME, some I can only run using a boot disk for DOS 6.0 and even some that my CPU/FSB is too fast to run no matter what...I even have a bootable FAT16 partition that I use to load old games to and find out if I get runtime errors or what...most of the real old stuff just hangs on the install...
...bottom line seems to be run the games on the best version of hardware/software it was designed for or hope you can tweek untill it works.
I was reading in PC mag where XP has settings that can emulate some of the older DOS enviroments but I can't find a way around the CPU/FSB speed being an issue on some of the games.
Right now I'm going through my boxes of stuff to put together a PIII 650 that I should have the parts for and see what I can do with that, I may even try a few flavors of Linux on it (...also thinking of making it my server and put this one behind it.....anyone that has some good links for info on that would make my day!!!)...if that's not slow enough to play my older DOS games I have a 333mhz MoBo & CPU that I'll put together just for the old games...(so many choices...so little time!!)
...anyway, I run DOS6.0, '95(very basic) and ME on this system right now and it does most of what I want...I have 2K pro and XP pro on another of my bootable drives but realy don't use them much because ME is the default boot OS and my wife is most comfortable with it....it's my "bloated" system with the user defaults as safe as I can make it (also the one with a full image on another drive...best way to fix trouble caused by other users)\
...lol...
...*sidenote*...anyony know anything about a program called "CPUKILLER" ??...from the notes it stresses your CPU enough to be slow enough to use older games but I fear it's at the cost of the life of your CPU....I'd rather kill mine fron OVERCLOCKING than underclocking if ya know what I mean....geez....I can buy a p100-233 box for anywhere from $25 to $75 depending on HD & amount of SIMM RAM it has...far less than this XP1600 is at least!!!!!!!!!
...oh well...back to the 650 project......!!!!!!!

[wizard101uk]

If I were you, and I was like you at one point.
GO WITH WIN2K ALL THE WAY.
Far better than 98 and ME.
So it takes longer to boot than 98, SO what it's not that much longer and it's far better at running games than 98/ME.
I have used all the O/S at some point.
XP is ****(sorry XP lovers, but it is.)
98 is okay, but a bit dated.
ME, never had any trouble with the 2 years I used.
Linux, no real game support.
Which leaves Win2k.
The choice is yours,.

[AllGamer]

What about the older games that only run in Win9x ??

you can't run those in Win2k, even if you select compatibility mode, same problem with WinXP

[BipolarBill]

I think that anyone who dual-boots Win2K will eventually dump Win98 and those old DOS games because he/she will get sick of dealing with the resource problems, lockups and blue screens.

It's just a matter of time.

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Bill, thats exactly why i dumped my dual boot in favour for plain 2k... however now im seeing the reasoning behind dual boot, but ONLY for troubleshooting purposes, i intend to add win98 to a new partition some time in the future, as it may just save my bacon someday ...

--Jakk

[AllGamer]

that's all part of life
for everything there is/are always a
Pro & Con argument