> I remember playing an mp3 would make my computer stutter in other tasks in win98 even on a then-new Pentium 4 Really? I don't remember that combination being

> I remember playing an mp3 would make my computer stutter in other tasks in win98 even on a then-new Pentium 4 Really? I don't remember that combination being that bad. I was using low-latency Creative drivers and Reason on a low-end eMachines desktop about that time, with a full instrument rack including 5+ samplers and 3-5 synths, and 6-8 effect units, making music for CD-ROM titles. At that time I didn't experience crashes or freezes even once a week...though later on my roomate with Windows Me and some girl dancing on his taskbar was a different story :-) Platforms were really key back then, too. '90s Linux was really rare outside of tech circles. You could get a basic OS, a desktop _probably_, bonus if you knew your monitor's modelines (fingers crossed), some desktop choices, but the desktop and server software scene was mostly out of the question for Windows power users and even OS/2 power users. Not only was choice a real issue, but documentation and things like dependency hell were serious issues... So if you had some desktop software you liked, let's say you were a Delphi person who could make anything, the platform really owned you...but the platform also had basic affordances for things--driver rollbacks for crashes; antivirus software to scan your stuff, and multitasking really depended on what you needed to multitask. There were options.