I really think that many negative posts here are illegitimate. Limewire is extremely stable and heavily tested on certified platforms. We can't guarantee a good stability on systems that have been upgraded multiple times to a newer OS, without also upgrading the hardware or the display driver.
I am convinced that most problems lie within the hardware or its drivers, most commonly the display driver DirectX support, which can be bogous and freeze the computer.
Beware also of your legacy harddisk DMA support drivers. If they were developed for Windows 95/98 and not upgraded to a newer Windows 2000/XP driver, you may get lots of trouble in any graphically intensive apps.
Also if you are using FAT/FAT32 filesystems, they are not as fullproof face to application or system hangs in various applications, and filesystem corruption or errors tend to cumulate to a point where files will start overwriting themselves.
The NTFS filesystem of Windows NT/2000/XP is a real improvement for system stability. Its performance cost is not significant face to the many problems it avoids, notably face to corruption of data structures: NTFS resists much better because this filesystem is journaled and knows how to rollback automatically any unfinished transaction.
If there's only one reason why someone should use Windows XP instead of Windows 95/98, it's certainly for its support of NTFS. Upgrading to Windows XP without converting the FAT/FAT32 partitions to NTFS is really a bad choice you'll regret.
Also don't trust Microsoft when it says defragmenters are not necessary: an extreme fragmentation occurs after about 1 month of use, but shamely its defragmenter is really poor. Some excellent defragmenter will save your harddisk from failures (I can give you some names: Diskeeper (try at least its free limited version) which can perform background defragmentation to maintain the system performance, and PerfectDisk which is slower but still faster than Windows Defrag and does not maintain the performance as well as Diskeeper but has a better FULL defragmenter (which can successfully defragment all NTFS system files).
Personnally I use both: PerfectDisk once every month to perform a full defragmentation, and Diskeeper that runs in the background and performs even faster and better if all the system files have been fully defragmented by PerfectDisk.
With both of these tools and NTFS partitions, Windows XP is now much faster and more stable than with Windows 98 on my old PC upgraded multiple times (Windows 95, 95OSR2, 98, 98SE, ME, XP and its two services packs), including new larger and faster drives, more memory, a SCSI controler, a new display board, a new power supply and box, and finally a new motherboard and processor, ...
Don't forget Windows Update and driver updates...
My best PC has evolved multiple times step by step, without needing to reinstall all or loose all my past files since 5 years, up to the point where most of its components have been upgraded, and I have a second fully working PC that I converted into a Linux server. |