>2. The best hardware solution is to have two hard drives on two controllers. Large table copies, joins, etc. should always read from one physical drive and write to the other. Can cut real-world times by 50% or more.
>

Absolutely not a correct statement. A RAID solution is going to outperform this by a wide margin.

>3. If there are a lot of linear reads and writes, Win 98 with FAT32 is actually faster than WinNT. (For that matter Fox/DOS on OS/2 is faster than any possible windows platform, but this is not practical in most cases).
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Absolutely, positively, beyond any shadow of a doubt wrong, especially with a dual processor configuration. NT with NTFS and stripe sets (or better, hardware RAID) and correct tuning of NT is going to leave the biggest, fastest baddest Win9x box bleeding an inch or two from the starting line.