"Dual Celeron @552 is no better than a single PIII-450"
Maybe on your planet. Not on mine. You wanna back this up with some proof? In fact, I'll show evidence saying otherwise
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~jamesw/mine.jpg
We all know the celeron and P3 core is about the same, except that the P3 has SSE, but that doesn't affect windows performance. In fact, the P3 450 is the old katmai design, the cache is the off chip half speed one. It's pretty impossible for a single P3 450 to beat 2 celerons at 552 in windows performance. Can a P3-450 burn CDs on an IDE burner, compress MP3s and run unreal tournament all at the same time? Good luck.
NTFS was extremely fast under NT4 for me, the disk accesses were almost completely unnoticeable to me. I can't say the same for Win2k. This isn't a file system issue. Not to mention at the time I bought my drive, it was easily the fastest IDE hard drive for NTFS.
I have a toshiba 2x IDE dvd-rom. NT just sees it as a CD/DVD drive, it can view, access and copy all the files on the drive, but it can't play them. I need to install powerDVD to be able to play my DVDs, but that is also the case for win2k. So I say again, under NT4 (and yes with DX3), all my multimedia files play great. MP3s, MPEGs, AVIs, wavetable MIDIs, CDs, DVDs, they all run great. Wanna be more specific about why the multimedia is lacking under NT4, besides saying "lousy multimedia"? Your accusations of bad multimedia under NT4 are vague.