Windows XP Architecture PT.1

[Dreamware]

Just thought everybody would appreciate some background on the new Architecture of Windows XP:

Starting with Windows 2000's protected mode kernel, Microsoft has added the extensive device support and plug-and-play capabilities of Windows 9x/ME. Micrisoft has also rewrote portions of the kernel to improve the OS's boot, resume, and application-load times, as well as its memory management and Registry handling. The infamous "blue screen of death" crashes were often caused by incompatible device drivers. This brings us to a new feature called "driver signing", this means that if a driver is not signed-meaning it hasn't been approved by WIndows Hardware Quality Lab-Windows XP warns you and can prevent the driver install. However, drivers that are not digitaly signed will probably still work, but may cause instabilities, my advice try to stick with signed drivers. Next on on the list is DLL or dynamic link library files. In previous versions of windows, only one copy of a DLL was allowed in memory at one time. If an application installed an updated DLL,(i.e PTLE) any earlier version in the same directory would be overwritten. Thus, our favourite applications depending on older DLL's would crash. To fix this inherent problem, Microsft has allowed Windows XP to have more than one version of a DLL, allowing each application its own version. Actually on an interesting note, XP can run different applications with different versions of the same DLL files side by side without conflict by running each application in its own memory space. Now we all know that poor memory management is another cause of instability in the Windows 9x family causing instability as well (Hence why us PTLE users use no more than 512MB of RAM). Such quirks such as letting device drivers allocate unavailable memory are gone. Memroy pool management has been drastically changed and optimized to handle physical memory allocation better, reducing disk-based virtual memory use. Also, the amount of pages of memory that the OS can map for allocaton is twice what Windows 2000 supports, improving performance by reducing costly memory cleanups.

* PT. 2 coming soon...

Regards,

Alex T.

[B.Ray]

That alone is enough to make me want to upgrade. Are there any disadvantages? (Aside from the usual, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", kinda' stuff).

[Dreamware]

The only disadvantage of Windows XP is that it is currently not supported with PTLE, other than that it is the best OS I have ever experienced using.

Regards,

Alex T.

[stephenh]

I haven't personally used XP too much yet, but I sell PC's and so far the (lack of) problems with XP has been amazing. As suggested already, the only real problem has been driver related with unsigned drivers causing the problems.

In my opinion, XP Pro is worth spending the extra money for. As I said though, I haven't used it much myself yet, and I am curious about its compatibility with the Digi001. Any idea's?

[mjames08]

Alot of those features(ie. driver signing) are available in Windows 2000.. Also, if you delete or rename any system files, Windows will repair them automatically. There is actually a 'backup' of all important system files on you system somewhere.. ingenious [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[yavuzj]

Thanks man. I can easily say that all of the info here is fresh for me. Thanks. [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]