Win 2000 Prof or Win Xp Prof

flywheel

so a mate asked for a hand upgrading his PC from 98SE to a more modern OS.

originally it was a Home spec Dell PC, he has a laptop running XP Prof so is used to it, and he would be an average PC user but a bit of guidance would be beneficial for more techie tasks... so I thought getting a copy of XP Prof would be the way to go especially as it is a bit more user friendly and grand for a small / home office environment - he's be using it as mixed personal / work machine

so out we go to pick up a copy and end up in a store where they don't have XP in stock only 2000 - the person behind the desk starts saying XP will crash (don't find my XP machine chashes any more than the 2000 box) and giving examples of how some college he is in removed XP and installed 2000 off a load of machines due to 'loads of problems', not that this multi user / public machine case study is relevant to a one person / private machine situation

so anyhow my mate wanted it all done that evening so opts to get 2000, in the end it didn't get upgraded as something else came up - looking at the package it's an OEM version (didn't think that could be sold without purchasing 'equipment' with it?) so not having been opened the opportunity is there to take it back and get a proper boxed copy of XP Prof (upgrade version as he has 98SE already)...

anyone any thoughts - stick with this 2K or go with XP Prof...

thanks,
BrianG

secret_squirrel

go with xp prof it will have a longer shelf life.....and afaik OEM vers should only be sold with a pc.

Im not sure a lot of the goodies in XP SP2 will find their way into W2k

Cake Fiend

The guy who told you XP would crash is a moron. This wouldn't happen to have been in somewhere like PC World/Compustore/Dixons would it?

XP is a no-brainer at this stage (unless the machine you're using is a pile of poo and will run 2K more comfortably than XP). Better third-party support, better driver support out of the box (better driver support in general I find), better MS support from now on I'd imagine. He's already used to XP's quirks as well.

dahamsta

Depends on the definition of "pile of poo". I have a 1GHz machine here with 768MB SDRAM which I'd consider out of date (but not a pile of poo) and I wouldn't put XP on it. Going by the few machines I've used XP on, I don't think I'd put it on anything less than 2GHz, unless hangs and delays float your boat. You might get away with 1.5-2.0, but I don't think I'd (personally) be comfortable with it.

adam

joePC

Go with XP Pro, W2K is good but only if the PC is slow, as for XP the processor speed is not really a defining factor it would more rely on the RAM once you have 512 - 1gig of ram & 1Gig proc then XP would run perfect.

Thanks JoePC

BigEejit

like Dahamsta says, older machines run very well with 2000 but arent the greatest running Xp .... me man in the shop is a bullshitter .... they probably have loads of copies of 2000 and want to shift them so they hide the XP's until the 2000's are all gone and give that dumbass story any time anyone asks

Bring it back

sceptre

Xp works fine on my 450Mhz laptop (the 384 megs of Ram probably helps a wee bit). People have even commented that it's pretty nippy (or zippy, I'm not up with this modern jargon).

I like win2k but there's no real reason to go for win2k if you're paying full price for the upgrade anyway and XP is the same price.

Meanwhile, XP Home will do instead if he doesn't need to connect to a domain.

Dun

And XP runs fine on my PIII 933 with 256MB ram.

secret_squirrel

XP Pro ran slowly but bearably on my Celly 300a@450 with 128mb

Red Alert

I think XP's quite processor-intensive, rather than needing a lot of RAM. It zips along on my 2GHz athlon with 256MB. Your mate also needs to consider that XP has better device driver support as it's designed for 'power users' at home. Your mileage with lots of 'weird' peripherals will be much greater with XP than 2000.

As for crashes, i dunno where this sales person got that from. Simple fact is Win XP not in stock, so you go elsewhere and he doesn't make his sales target. He flogs you Win 2000 and he does. That's all it is. Hence the reason i don't go to PCWorld/Dixons and especially Compustore anymore.

ColmOT [MSFT]

I'd recommend XP (of course )

The reasons are as follows:

1: If you have a machine that's not as fast/high spec as you'd like, you can turn off the flashy XP UI and make it look like W2K therefore removing any additional processing power required for the XP UI.

2: By turning off the XP UI, you are getting the W2K appearence with all the extra functionality that XP offers for effectively the same processing power.

3: XP does not crash as often as W2K - it's a fact! 95% of crashes are caused by misconfigured hardware, or using drivers that are not written correctly or are not supported on Windows XP. This is the same on any OS - not just XP.

4: XP is faster the majority of the time than W2K

5: While Windows 2000 is still fully supported, and isn't going away anytime soon, it's still better to go with the most recent OS because it'll be more supported with extra free add-ons etc from the microsoft.com website.

6: XP has the build in firewall which will help protect your system & home netwrok from malicious worms and virii

7: XP has a much broader range of supported hardware, and has some great functionality for digital camera/scanning etc

8: XP has CD-Burning built into it natively.

9: XP home should retail at ~€199 and is more than suitable for home users who don't need to join a domain

zilog_jones

2k will run on practically ANY half-decent PC though. There's a computer lab in UL* that still (astonishingly) has P166 MMXs with 128MB RAM and ancient S3 Trio 2MB video cards, all running Win2k... very... slowly. Pretty much the absolute minimum minimum requirements. They are *usable*, but even web browsing was pretty slow - then again it seems all the graphical niceties are on, including alpha blending! Aaargh! It takes a good few seconds for the start menu to appear.

*This one uber-crappy lab does not reflect the general quality of UL's PCs - all the others are at least P2 450s, and over half of the labs have now been upgraded to P4s. Though they're pretty much all smelly Dells...