Well, first the majority of your problems will most likely be due to using Windows ME. That OS should never have been released. It is even more b0rked than the W9x line. Frankly for stable MS development machines you basically have to go NT. Which means nowadays NT5 (aka W2k) or XP .

Also in addition to the excellent unix tools from cygwin there are also a variety of power toys available from

1. Microsoft itself (Tweak-UI).
2. Other third party producers (ask Strat)
3. Sysinternals. This is a rich source of extremely useful development and power tools. Some of them will be immediately familiar to a *nix user (PSTools) some of which are of uniquely MS'ish flavour (Reg Mon ) and some are just generally useful (Process Explorer). Either way if you are stuck or frustrated about something MS related there is a _really_ good chance that the excellent people at SysInternals will have the tool you need.

HTH

Yves / DeMerphq
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Writing a good benchmark isnt as easy as it might look.