I've found that, by means of a machine with removable frame/tray-mounted drives, I can quickly compare how fast a system with one OS is when compared to another OS. I use DOS 6.21 as the benchmark, and, frankly, have yet to see a piece of software that will run under DOS+Win3.1x that isn't heavily burdened by the "features" in Win9x or XP. Not every Win3.1x app will run under XP, and even fewer DOS app's will work properly because of their driver-dependence, but DOS+Win3.1x is still the fastest and most productive, in terms of man-hours consumed. IMHO, after Win9x arrived, it was too much playing with the mouse and menus, and not enough getting the work done.

With Microsoft's tendency to turn everything on, rather than leaving it turned-off, I suspect there are many security holes that have had to be addressed with patches, and, of course, inter-process communication still seems to be quite buggy, to wit, the frequent crashes in rundll32.whatever.

RE