Conclusion
The tests show that there's no reason today to use Windows 98/ME in a new system. In many of the benchmarks, XP and 2000 are ahead - albeit only by a small margin. The biggest advantage of 2000 and XP, however, is in the more modern architecture, which, thanks to the increased stability and safety from crashes, allows for a much more relaxed work environment - and, of course, increased demands on the hardware as well.
98/ME users might ask if it is worth spending the money on XP and the additional RAM required for 2000/XP. This depends, above all, on how you plan to use the system. If you're only going to play games on it, then you can continue to use ME or 98SE. Most of the manufacturers no longer offer driver support for 98, but support for ME should still continue for a long time. All ME drivers work on 98 without a hitch (the naughty ones say that ME is only the retail version of a service pack for 98 SE...).
For those who use their PCs for other purposes as well should turn to XP or 2000 - with regard to performance, there's no difference between them. Games now run on both systems with optimal performance, and they mostly run faster than on the older operating systems. Only the 60 Hz problem (http://xp-refresh.net/ ) puts a considerable damper on the gaming experience. Here, the only thing that will help is to turn to the freeware tools mentioned at the beginning of this article. In the following, we list the freeware tools for the most widely used graphics card series. For Windows XP, there's Service Pack 1, which many users are reluctant to use, for various reasons.
ATI Radeon cards:
NVIDIA GeForce cards:
Kyro series:
Windows XP Service Pack 1:
