I think that you are the one speaking rediculously...

An obscene amount of memory?  You've got to be joking?  Besides, NT is for
those that need and use large amounts of memory.  It's also far more stable
with large amounts of memory.

>NT 5.0.  And once you've tried NT, you'll wish you had 98 back.  Trust
>me; I regularly use and write software for both, and 98 boots much

As do I.  I'd much prefer NT over 98.  You say NT takes longer to boot?  The
only response I've got for that is to ask you a question...  Would you
rather boot once a day and have it take a little longer than have to reboot
10 times a day?  In my personal experiance, the former is better.  I'm sick
to death of getting illegal operations!!!

>I've never run POV-Ray under NT, but I'm sure that it would have speed
>improvements doing so.

Hmm, that's interesting.  From my benchmarks, NT renders 5 times faster than
98 in 3D Studio MAX R2.5.  Now if that isn't a substantial increase I don't
know what is.  Obviously POV-Ray is an exception to this as it wasn't
specifically built for NT.

>NT really is a crappy OS.  It is not suitable for desktops, and the

>It's also not suitable for servers, because it crashes so often and

Well, those two statements I can't agree with either.

For the first:  Why not?  The rendering station at my school seems to cope
well with it.  It is also only a P233 with 64Mb of RAM.  It runs a
Perception DSP drive and a video output subsystem.  I've NEVER had a crash
or the slightest problem.  A DSP drive won't even run under 98 or 95 because
of it's useless subsystem, even if the processor is much more powerful and
you have more RAM.

And for the second statement:  What else are you planning on using?  Some
out-of-date operating system that is totally incompatible with all major
network standards... I don't think so.  At work we run NT perfectly well.
It acts as a server for a network and also as an internet pipeline and proxy
server.  It has never crashed in the time I've been there and I don't
believe it ever will.  It usually has to cope with being online for several
days, even weeks at a time without restarting.  It is fully compatible with
all hardware and the drivers all came with the hardware anyway.  It's been a
total breeze.  On the other hand, if you were to try to do that with another
operating system I think that you would find you'd have major problems.

Now back to the original subject:  Multi-processing.

If Windows 98/95 DID support multi-processors I'd suppose that they could be
viable for rendering, however the lack of memory support and fixed system
resource setting is a pain and causes high-end apps like 3D Studio MAX to
crash frequently.  One of the biggest problems of running MAX on 95/98 is
fixed resources.  Not many people understand the way 95/98 handles system
resources.  I have to make this clear, memory has nothing to do with
resources in 95/98.  The resources are ultimately fixed.  NT doesn't have
this problem, it has infinite resource allocation, something MAX needs to
run correctly.  When using MAX on 98 I will have to restart everytime I
leave the program, simple because 98 can't handle the resource allocation,
even with 160Mb of RAM.  The same setup running NT:  it will never crash, I
can't even get it to.  I never have to restart and it uses memory much more
efficiently (yes, in NT you generally need more than to run 95/98, but as I
said before, high-end apps need higher memory anyway).  Rendeirng times are
faster, multi-processors speed up rendering to higher levels than I've ever
seen before, and the usefulness of being able to run several instances of
MAX is a bonus beyond comparison.  The architecture of 95/98 means that
unfortunately it is impossible to open a second instance of MAX.

I do however agree with you on the pricing of NT, which I believe is far
overpriced (as is the way with Microsoft products unfortunately).

I'm a naturally argumentive person I think, so don't take it personally.

--
Lance.


---
For the latest 3D Studio MAX plug-ins, images and much more, go to:
The Zone - http://come.to/the.zone

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