Wow anything is better than Windows9x
Windows9x is basically a GUI ontop of Dos and some paging and multitasking.
Reasons not to use Windows9x:
You know why you get lockups while reading from a disk?
Well windows goes into Virtual 8086 mode and uses int 0x13 (Realmode) to read from the disk since they were too lazy to write
a protected mode driver for it. Virtual 8086 is like a bad workaround to not having realmode interrupts (Unless you use it for int 0x10 to switch to VESA)
The kernel in Windows98 is mapped with a User flag in paging not supervisor and it's Readwrite. That means ANY application can overwrite the ENTIRE KERNEL and since the kernel has the global bit on it will overwrite the kernel for EVERY PROCESS crashing EVERY PROCESS at once and effectively killing the kernel. Nice job Microsoft.
FAT32 - FATxx is out of it's time. It fragmentates easily and has no security features like NTFS and ext2(3) do. This FS is basically a linked list of directory entries and some jumps here and there. It's so simple I coded a driver for it in about 20 minutes. (Owned.)
Also it's longname workaround (To allow filenames with more than 8 characters) is the shittiest idea in the existance of filesystems, holy shit they are stupid.
WTFUCK - It treats Page Faults (Yes FAULT) as fatal errors, a page fault is RECOVERABLE which may causes a bunch of crashes for machines with little ram. A pagefault recovery is as easy as swapping out the memory from the swap partition (or file) and invalidating the new pages. Good job.
Reasons why not to use Windows ME:
It has a shitty name and it crashes a lot.
Windows XP:
This seems to be Microsoft's semi well made OS. It follows some dated ideas but overall it was a good improvement dispite what people say. The problem with it is that we're in a new age where there are evil people we like to call hackers and these hackers do things that the people in the matrix did. They get inside your PC and attack you (those hooligans). Microsoft was heavily criticized for not having a secure OS (This lead to SP2 which I don't think fixed anything just gave you a firewall rofl) The GUI is also the ugliest motherfucking UI I have ever seen.
Windows Vista:
This seems to be an OS that's doing some things right. It's a little hardware intensive but it's a new age of PC and most people have good hardware. First off, this OS is going to feature a fully scriptable console (Seems the Linux research labs are paying off :p) and some pretty unique FS features. The overall look+feel is a lot nicer with a lot of transparency, shadows, and what not.
Now Vista is doing some things that werent possible some years ago, they are moving things to user mode. The audiostack and video core has been moved to user land. The advantage over that is that you don't need to communicate with the kernel as much now and when say the GUI crashes it can simply be restarted withought crashing the kernel (Say hello to less kernel crashes). The audio will also perform much faster.
Now back in say 1998 and stuff when DirectX was just a baby, most people used software to render 3D (not good technology :/) and moving the video to the kernel made it more local and made it faster (but suffered a loss in stability). Today we have DirectX 9 and games like Doom 3 and Half-Life2 some of the most graphic intensive games. We CAN move the video to user mode and the speed decrease is almost nothing since all the rendering is now done via hardware. (Go innovation)
Anyway yea this evolved into sorta a rant but who gives a shit.
Welcome to x86.
