I have been told by some XP owners that XP running on a P4 board is "slower" than when running on an AMD Super Athlaon K7 board of the same clock speed. The story is that the AMD boards have been optimized to run XP "faster". Just to add more confusion to the debate I have heard rumors that Win2K still benchmarks faster than XP on any board. On the other hand some folk claim that The newer P4s are more stable, reliable, and run "cooler" than the AMD boards are noted for running much "hotter", than the P4s which need massive, noisy cooling fans. I have two machines that I use, one runs Win2K (P4), and the other Win98 (K7). Fractint runs fine on both machines. I may eventually upgrade one of my older machines to XP just for comparisons sake. I've also been thinking about installing Linux on one of my older Dos boxes for a while just for a look-see. I have an older machine, which boots to Win95 in DOS command prompt mode as the default startup. I use this box for rendering in fractinct. I just load fractint, set up the parameters, and then start rendering the file and forget about it. It's only a P2/455 Mhz, consequently, one of my later images took over 4 days to render. Since it's not even a backup machine that kind of "fire and forget" strategy works fine for me. I have also experimented with another strategy which has really improved my image rendering time. I write the parmeter file to run in Fractint, then using the same par file created for Fractint I render the image in UltraFractal 2/3. This works fine a lot of the time, however some formlas and parameters don't exactly transpose across to UF perfectly so sometimes, I get an error message. Since at the moment I'm not skilled enough at parameter and formula writing to track down the "glitch", I then go ahead and render in Fractint. All the best, TG ----- Original Message ----- From: "Raymond Filiatreault" <rayfil@hotmail.com> To: <fractint@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Sunday, October 13, 2002 11:48 PM Subject: [Fractint] Re: Fractint on XP

I have just purchased a new Pentium 4, 1.5 gHz, with the XP Home Edition. Not being able to load the driver for my scanner (new driver versions for

XP

are not available and will not be), I asked my supplier to install Win98 as a second OS on the system. That should also take care of any potential problems of running Fractint on this new machine.

This double OS approach is even suggested on Microsoft's site for users who still want to run older programs which cannot be compatible with XP even with its "compatibility wizard" feature.

During the few hours that I managed to 'play' with this new toy, I tried running one of my semi-useless programs performing a calculation and recording the time it takes. This new one took TWICE AS LONG as my current P3-550e! I'm anxious to test if this is due to the XP or the P4. I also intend to test how Fractint speed will be affected.

Raymond Filiatreault

_________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com

_______________________________________________ Fractint mailing list Fractint@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fractint