I am talking about Windows 2000 SP4 vs Windows XP when both systems were alive. And yes, Windows 2000 had real life advantages over XP in that time (speed). It is not nostalgia, I have tested it thoroughly on real machines. Today both systems are dead. And it is hard and dishonest to compare them to today's OSes in totally different world. PS. And yes, Windows 2000 died way faster than XP. But it is well known fact. It has never been really mainstream OS, but it doesn't mean that it was as bad as let's say Windows Me.
First, which XP you're talking about? If you want to do a fair comparison you must compare apples with apples It's too easy to say XP was slower if you talk of XP SP3, With the firewall enabled, the system restore in place, the luna GUI over the classic one, a long string of .net updates and security mitigations, v.s. a plain Win2K sp4 Just compare Win2K sp4 with a contemporary XP Sp1, disable the themes, disable any IPV6 stack you may have installed, disable the system restore, in short put it on the same conditions, and ten tell me which one is faster. It's something you can do easily in parallel using vmware or virtualbox (better to not use anything before XP52/Server2003 in Hyper-V)
No, I am talking about Windows XP SP2 with classic GUI and a lot of services disabled. It was still slower, no matter what I have done. Similar situation with Windows 2000 vs 98se. 98se was always faster, regardless of Win2000 optimizations. Of course, I am talking about machines that I have used in years 2004-2006. It is the past now.
Check again, now, using two identical VMs Similar? There is nothing in common between those two comparisons. Win2K was just the betaish XP, a very minor change. Win98 had nothing to do with Win2K (aka NT5), they had a similar GUI, end of the analogy. They were completely different beast. With completely different ancestors Win98 was an extreme evolution of the DOS, the NT family is a derivative of OS2 and VMS. It's like comparing a motoscooter with modern car. Obviously the former is smaller and lighter, but...
I won't check anything. All these OSes are dead and dead are machines on which I have used them in the past. But on bare metal 2000 was faster than XP and 98se was faster than 2000.
Yeah... I always forget that you have a problem with facts Sure, like vinyl records, tube amplifiers, film photography, mechanical watches, microswitch keyboards....
Surely not facts but another bulls**t. Modern VMs, launched on modern CPUs + NVMe machines are 100% artificial environment. They are nowhere similar to bare metal machines used in 2004. For me it is closed topic. I do not plan to dig up Stone Age computers to test something I tested tens of times a long time ago, when I have used these machines day by day. And yes, I had dual boot Win98se + Win2000, Win2000 + XP and many other configurations used on regular basis. Older OSes were faster. It was obvious to everybody at that time.
Obvious and correct not always are synonyms. Win8 is faster than Win7, Win7 is faster than vista, WinXP RTM was faster than 2K. And so on. Let the "obvious" arguments to be discussed where they belong, in a Bar/Pub between half drunk rednecks Perhaps "at that time" I managed/installed/fixed something like 400 PC and servers per year, may not be the most absolute statistic of the universe, but for sure better than one or two PCs observed by an inexperienced kid. P.S. if for you a comparison done in a modern VM is too much, you can always use a proper emulator like 86box, PCem or alike, those are emulating every single bit of old machines, including the original bios
If you were right, old OSes on old machines would have been so slow that completely unusable. So we wouldn't have had usable computers at all in 2000 and before. And Windows 10 would be good and fast for 486-style computer. Pure logic.