'Windows system resources consumption'...fixed with WIN2K?

[leoblob]

WIN3.1 was notorious for using up system resources... and for not letting them go when a program was closed... WIN95 was a little better... WIN98 was a little better again. Has this situation been fixed with WIN2K..?? I'm now running WIN2K, I don't see anywhere to check what percentage of system resources is being used... I hope this is no longer an issue...???

[jdhurst]

Windows 9x measured "system resources" and there is no real counterpart in Windows NT (NT4, 2000 and XP are NT systems). Use Task Manager in Windows NT and see what is going on. Right click on the Task Bar and select Task Manager.

My XP Pro system and my Windows 2000 system before that generally runs (ran) at under 3 percent CPU most of the time. I can't remember what my NT4 system did, I never ran 98, and never checked 95 or 3.1.
... JD Hurst

[leoblob]

OK, I think I understand your answer... to make sure I have this right... in WIN95/98 (I can't remember 3.11 for sure), there are System Resources, User Resources, and GDI Resources. It's possible to use these up, even though you have plenty of RAM, a fast processor, plenty of hard drive space, etc. I had believed that the limitation on these resources was due to some fairly small amount of memory (64K??) which Windows specifically allocated to these resources... that once this memory was used up, you were out of luck.

So, in WIN2K and XP, the OS doesn't work this way??

[jdhurst]

That's right. NT-based systems don't work the way 9x systems did. NT-based system have (amongst other things) a monolithic memory structure that addresses all memory as one pool. It has much better memory control. You can even run a virtual OS and isolate it completely from the host OS. Not possible with 9x. Error control, file security, event handling, hardware isolation are all better in NT. ... JD Hurst

[leoblob]

Thank you!