I know about 2000/XP are more stable… anyway… there are always many services that ruins audio performance, consume very precious ram memory, etc.
For build a dedicated Renoise computer, what OS would do best job?
(no other programs installed/no internet… nothing)… just only Renoise, VSTs and samples.
What about 98lite or XPlite?
MS-DOS? 
Renoise runs under Windows 98 and Win98 is widely known for running “stable” enough for music software. It has far less system requirements than XP. Most music programs (Wavelab) also work perfect under this OS.
While you need at least 512 MB RAM to work seamless under XP, Win98 does the job with 128 MB.
W98 still uses DOS-functions to adress the hardware and so, the data-transfer might be a bit faster which results in lower latencies.
IMHO the best would be to install XP for business work and Win98 just for Renoise.
In that case yes, i think 98se will be better choise.
But since we can’t live without other programs, internet etc, i prefer win 2000 
)
indeed. The only problem would be booting if you want to do some other stuff while creating music… (read email, surf the net…) But if you are serious about music then it’s not propably such a big probem…
Without beeing an expert in drivers and such, I seriously doubt this is true. Why would DOS functions be closer to the hardware than Windows functions? For example ASIO and DirectX was developed to enhance the speed, which is made by accessing the hardware as direct as possible.
No, I can agree that XP has a lot of more features (more processes, threads, mem…) which overall slow downs the system, but that it should be impossible to write fast drivers for XP is ridiculous.
I found these statements while googling the net. I am no hardware-expert, either.
But one thing is for sure: When I create music, I do not need alpha-blending, smooth scrolling menus or a threadsafe environment. Windows XP has a lot of advantages compared to Windows 98 but these advantages cost a lot of speed, memory and HDD-Space. With my Terratec I had latencies about 4 ms using W98. In XP, 11 ms is the smallest possible…
Do you have the link? Would be interesting to see the difference…
Have you tweaked it anything (check out musicxp.net) or is this a default XP setup? Sounds like a big difference from 4 to 11 ms…
Im reading pages… and at least for ASIO usage you need win98SE cause u need WDM drivers for ASIO
Its not posible use ASIO on win95?
(maybe directsound drivers on a clean win95 system will work so great)
On the PC Renoise uses Direct X - it doesn’t talk to your hardware at all.
All your alpha fading menus can be turned off.
I’m sorry but if you aren’t using 2000 or XP you are using a piece of shit.
I used to use windows 2000 proffesional.
but that OS only supported 10 of my 16 inputs on my soundcard.
Now I use Windows 98. Very stable and speedy on new hardware.
Are you sure that’s an issue with the OS and not one with the drivers provided by your manufacturer?
I would avoid Win98 if you are using sample-based VST instruments, as Win98 is not able to manage more than 256MB of physical RAM, as far as I know.
ehm… sic - forget what I said. I had some misconfiguration in my ASIO-Drivers and I finally managed to get a very small latency (1ms) in Renoise using Windows XP. I did not try VSTi-Stuff, yet but I guess then, I will have to increase the latency-values 
So, I guess Windows XP is a good choice.
BTW: Thanks for this musicxp.com-link.
i have not read any of the sites, however that XP and 2000 would have higher hardware access latency is actually probably true. Here’s why:
from DOS - win98se hardware access from the operating system level to the system was direct. Software would access hardware devices (ie: the soundcard) by connecting directly to the device (remember having to specify Hardware Address, IRQ and DMA settings?). This allowed for really low latency and is also why alot of old school trackers ran faster than new ones, and for coding of soundcardread and write routines in assembly.
while 98se was happily going along with it’s direct speedy hardware access, there were problems with this. If a program that was utilizing direct interrupt access to a hardware device would crash, often it would freeze the interrupt table and the whole system would crash right along with it. so…
when M$ came up with Windows NT (circa 3.1) one of the things they started experimentinng with is HAL (not the creepy computer from 2001, this stands for Hardware Abstration Layer).
HAL IS latency by design. It’s essentially a hardware instruction proxy that passes instructions from the application layer to the Hardware without direct access. This way, when Cubase crashes during playback, Win2k notices and releases the Interrupt Handles that Cubase was using back to the system’s resource pool.
It’s also why you have a hard time using 01d-5k001 trackers without hardware emulation of some sort. IT and FT2 understand a soundcard to be a device that hangs out somewhere around Hw: 330 IRQ: 5 DMA:1 . Trying to feed it a modern sound system connector is like trying to feed a tiger broccoli.
Some tigers like broccoli.