Th Dinosaur bites back - Windows 2000 on a VM STILL faster than W7 (x-32)

Hi all

OK I know that I can't run some new stuff on W2K but as a little experiment I tried running some things like EXCEL on W2K and a 32 bit W7 version - the official buid 7000 .

Office 2003 still runs on Windows 2000 BTW.

W2K with SP4 fixes seem to beat W7 by quite a long way even though I was running W2K on a Virtual machine and the W7 was on a physical machine..

I think a lot of it is caused by all the Aero and "eye candy" stuff in W7.

(Mind you the machine I was running the w2K virtual machine on had a Quad core and 16 GB RAM whereas the W7 machine was a T7250 Duo laptop).

It goes to show that running a Virtual Machine on decent hardware is perfectly viable and IMO is always better than messing around with dual booting - unless you really HAVE to dual boot -- for example some Video hardware needs to actually access the real hardware underneath rather than use the BIOS or the "Virtual hardware".

I needed this VM as I have an old 35 mm negative film agfa professional scanner which won't run (nor is it supported anymore) in XP or VISTA. The scanner is fine -- I still have loads of pre-digital negatives which I'm slowly "digitising". I also have a Minidisc device (works on XP but also works on this VM with SP4 applied. The whole VM fits on to a 2GB usb device so very portable as well.

The old Dinosaur isn't dead yet.

Cheers
jimbo

I had a stripped down version of win2k sp4, plus some unofficial updates installed for a while, was great for gaming on my low spec machine, boot up time was far longer than 7 though.

Hi there.

Boot up time of a VM is not normally significant provided the host has decent disks and a load of resources.

To get this to work on a "Physical machine" I'd have to hunt around for some weird SCSI and SATA drivers - also the hardware on my machine probably hadn't even been thought of when W2K was around - especially some of the 3d graphics.

But at the time W2K (together with Windows 2003 server ) were the best OS'es Microsoft has produced -- hopefully W7 will be in the same tradition.

Apart from Windows Me (which wasn't even a Toytown OS) the one I HATED the most (even more than VISTA) was

Windows NT (which we used to call Windows No Thanks or Windows NeanderThal).

Cheers
jimbo

Ah i never had it installed in vm, i was dual booting with 7, but it still took longer to load win2k, though was much faster when loaded.