What does it mean "in recent years"? Did QPC become better (and Sleep()/WaitForSingleObject() saner, as we're touching time-related stuff) in XP before EOLing?

What does it mean "in recent years"? Did QPC become better (and Sleep()/WaitForSingleObject() saner, as we're touching time-related stuff) in XP before EOLing? Assuming having Vista+, does it really work reliably even when called from a thread bound to only one core on various (not necessarily latest) hardware? Have you played with it under VMs? QPC was buggy and is still buggy for many users out there. After 15 years Microsoft is likely getting closer to sane behavior and maybe in latest Windows 8 (8.1) and Sever 2012 (2012 R2) it really works reliably in different setups and loads (haven't tested it yet). OTOH "getting better" by sole die out of setups, where it was working incorrectly, is not really getting any better. Viewpoint is important here. If you build your own infrastructure, you choose your HW/SW stack, can thoroughly test QPC behavior, then if it seems you go with same setup for your servers or what not [1]. But if you write software for all Windows users out there, then you don't have that much luxury. QPC is simply not good enough. You can always try with building some logic that falls back from QPC to lower resolution functions whenever odd behavior is detected, but unless you have HW/SW instances that you could test it on, then there is (high?) possibility you won't do it right, so maybe you shouldn't do it in the first place? 1 ms resolution at best should be enough in most cases. Increasing timer interrupt frequency from default 64 Hz (15.6 ms resolution) to 1000 Hz (1 ms resolution) indeed affects system behavior and can harm battery life, but it may be necessary evil. If we're talking about high-resolution time, then 1 ms resolution is simply that kind of thing for Windows (as ridiculous it may sound) if we take reliability into account. E.g. games, your multimedia applications and so on are already using timeBeginPeriod(1). Good news is that reportedly since Windows 8 the harm on battery is much less. [1] But if you really have control over HW/SW stack for your servers, then you'll quite likely happily avoid using Windows...