Maybe if you were entrenched in the Windows world. Storage-wise, UTF-8 is usually better since so much data is ASCII with maybe the occasional accented charact

Maybe if you were entrenched in the Windows world. Storage-wise, UTF-8 is usually better since so much data is ASCII with maybe the occasional accented character. The speed issue only really matters to Windows NT since that was UCS-2 inside, but it wasn't a problem for many.