What about running an empty Win98/FS9?

[Agrajag]

I run XP Pro SP2 and after a long time holding out, every partition is finally NTFS.

I'm not sure this is even an option given the drive formatting but I've been thinking about installing a boot manager to boot a very basic version of Windows 98 with very little in it except for video and sound drivers and FS9. I suspect that would result in far more of a performance increase than any minor hardware upgrade I might make. Yes it would be a hassle to fly this way, but not that much of one, and if the results were dramatic then it might just be worth it.

Has anyone tried this approach?

[wsieffert]

Are you somehow going to reformat a portion of your hardrive back to FAT32.

During beta testing, I ran FS2004 on the same computer dual booted Win98SE/WinXP Pro. I found FS2004 ran smoother with WinXP Pro. I believe the newer modules running in WinXP perform better over the *.VXD style modules in earlier OSs.

A better alternative would be to set aside a 10-15GB partition with WinXP and FS2004 installed. Remember you need internet access if you want downloaded weather.

W. Sieffert

[TheFlightMan]

I think you are reading too much into the clean boot environment and listening to the old crowd with the 98 setup. XP is much more efficient than 98 was, don't see how going back to it would benefit you much. Like with any system, just make sure you install what you really need and get rid of the extra luggage. I run XP Pro SP2, firewall, and antivirus and still manage to get great FPS.

Again, you are falling for this clean configuration talk that will do nothing for you. Even that black viper website that calls for the disabling of half of your XP services, I don't see a need for that. If you have an old system, no matter what you do, it will not be able to deliver good performance with FS9. I use to have a P4 1.8 with almost a gig of ram and a 5900XT, performance was average. Upgraded to a P4 3.0 and a Gig of DDR 400Mhz ram, performance is twice to three times as fast with the same software package.

TheFlightMan

[loki]

I agree with TheFlightMan about sticking with XP.

I have found XP is generally faster than Win98 on the same hardware, as long as you have enough memory. Win98 wouldn't benefit, and might even lose out, with more then 256MB of RAM. For XP, as long as you have more than 256MB, it should do much better. XP would also be far more stable and secure than Win98.

Disabling services in XP is can be a good idea for security, and maybe to free up some memory, but otherwise is probably more trouble than it's worth. Unless you have a service that is constantly using the processor, you won't see much of a performance benefit.

loki

[Agrajag]

I'm not really reading this anywhere. Just thinking aloud. I'm older so my experiences are a bit based on yesterday's thinking. I used to get GREAT performance out of various games by running them in a stripped Win95/98 setup.

However, everything said here makes total sense.

The problem I have is that I'm a sucker for SimFlyers sceneries (which are NOT optimized for ATI cards) and Ultimate Traffic. The combo really can create havoc on MY system with respect to fluid framerates. I can keep it smooth but then UT needs to be knocked down a bit. Plus my PSS Dash 8 doesn't help a lot either.

[TheFlightMan]

Agrajag,

Sounds like your issues are hardware related, bringing back a 16bit OS will not do you any good. I don't know what kind of system you have but it sounds to me like it's on the low end side of the house. If ATI is the issue then go for an NVidia card, they are nice and solid. My experiences in the past with ATI have been nothing short of a nightmare, from hardware failing prematurely to really bad driver problems. You still see that today, one driver works then the next one brings back issues from two previous drivers.

You will find a lot of folks on this forum that swear by clean boot systems and so forth. I really think that what you get in return is so minor that its not worth the trouble. There is no service that takes away significant CPU cycles and if it does, that is buggy software that should not be installed to begin with.

Remember, Win95/98 were not efficient at all no matter what anyone tells you. By the way, 512 of ram for XP is kind of on the low side, a gig is more like it.

TheFlightMan

[zoynyne]

Oh I'll disagree with 98 being slower - on OLD hardware...

On an OLD machine games will run better with 98, hands down.

By "old" I mean rigs under 800mhz or so...

Even some rigs around the 1 to 1.4ghz range will respond better with 98 - AGE usually being the real key here...

But once you get into hardware newer than aroun 2001 you usually find that XP works better...

[Agrajag]

I would think my system SHOULDN'T be a problem.

It's an Intel P4 2.8C (800MHz FSB), 1 GB of Kingston PC2700 or PC3200 RAM (I forget which exactly) and an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. That should run FS9 well but it has its troubles.

[loki]

The PII 350 that my parents use certainly seemed to run faster after putting XP on it. It does have 384MB of RAM, which I think really help. Anything to do with networking was much faster. The only part that sometimes felt a little slower was opening windows with the new theme, but you can disable that.

On other sites I have noticed similar comments. The amount of RAM seems to make a big difference. As most older machines had less than 256MB, XP didn't run too well. Once you get above that, XP ran fine.

loki