K
kony
There is no limit to creation of DVD quality video with
Win98 or 2K. Win9x does have the severe limitation of no
NTFS filesystem support so if by DVD quality you mean ~
4.7GB files (which of course will exceed FAT32's max of
4GB), that is a limit, but there's no reason to use WinXP
merely for DVD quality video, or to put it another way, any
of the good codecs and video manipulation tools/software/etc
runs fine on Win2k and some even on Win9x.
Ironically enough, that was also the main problem with
Win98, as many people who merely assumed it was very
instable, were having driver (or 3rd party) software
problems and over the course of time, not the course of OS
change, hardware and software vendors released more stable
code. The result is that today, a Win98 system with newest
drivers released for Win9x, is far more stable than 5 years
ago. That doesn't necessarily mean I'd suggest choosing it
for a newer system though.
Creative and ATI both have been notorious for bad drivers,
your situation might be an exception, in that most people
can just download the newest driver from the (product)
chipset manufacturer and do fine.
There is trivial difference between the two. "Sometimes"
SATA is a few percent faster, but it is still barely at the
threshold of human perception and is same situation as any
other hardware, things get a few percent faster year over
year. In other words, there is no reason to be sick of a
drive interface, they can both work equally well.
Certain types of XP problems can be compounded if you don't
have any virtual memory on your OS partition. Generally it
is a good idea to have at least a tiny pagefile on that
partition, as XP knows to use the other least used and
larger one first.
That seems a bit excessive. It would take ages to page 4GB.
It would be better to just buy more memory, a well
configured system should never be paging over a gig of data.