An easy question: XP x64 vs Win7 x64?

[Darth Shiv]

Used XP64 from the day of release it was actually a great OS and all the drivers needed were available for it. If you had trouble finding the XP64 drivers you could always use Winserver 2003 driver as they were run on the same underlying system, also there were many flavours of Linux that showed what a dominating processor the AMD64s were. Oh and my sound blaster worked just fine thank you.

Problem was gaming targeted hardware. I had a soundcard that didn't have a Win2k3 driver. Not x86 or x64. I in particular wanted the x86 driver because then I could kernel mod my Vista to enable PAE and use more than 4GB memory on x86 Windows but I lost my sound doing so!

 

[Vanderlinde]

Windows 98 SE even would be faster then XP.

But XP would be faster compared to 7.

You pick

 

[bazz2004]

When I managed to install W98 SE on a virtual machine a few years ago it wouldn't run anything involving video graphics so speed isn't everything. I couldn't even run games from that bygone era. Obsolete hardware is needed to run an obsolete Windows OS.

 

[Vanderlinde]

When I managed to install W98 SE on a virtual machine a few years ago it wouldn't run anything involving video graphics so speed isn't everything. I couldn't even run games from that bygone era. Obsolete hardware is needed to run an obsolete Windows OS.

Yes, your emulating it. The performance would never be on par like that.
Windows 98 was the fastest OS in terms for playing games / FPS based games. Big difference in between 98, 2000 and even XP.

 

[bazz2004]

How about trying to install W98 on a new machine? I suspect this would not be possible because little of the hardware would be recognised or even have compatible drivers. The comparison is meaningless.

 

[Vanderlinde]

Back in the days any competetive gamer could tell or feel the difference in between all three OS'es.