OT: Which is better: XP or 2000? > Another Piracy Discussion

se5a · #1 November 27th, 2003, 09:38 AM

if you are wanting compatibility (both HW and SW) get 98SE
if your carefull you can get it fairly stable.

I dont know much about 2000
but others have told me that XP is a little more stable.
I have XP pro on this and its prety good, I still havent looked at tweeking it yet, but I am impressed at the stability, even if I do get some kind of lockup it will usualy sort itself out given half a chance.

Atrocities · #2 November 27th, 2003, 11:47 AM

Avoid the problem of stablity all together and just buy a Mac.

Alneyan · #3 November 27th, 2003, 12:22 PM

PvK, what changes in XP user interface were you talking about? For me, XP looks almost like 98 after a few tweaks (removing the horrible basic interface, disabling Messenger and so on). Of course, with the basic interface, I can understand your problems.

As for old games, it mostly depends on the game in my experience. While Daggerfall runs like a charm on XP (yes, I even managed to play Daggerfall for several hours without a crash on XP), I have quite a few games that refuse to launch when they don't basically crash the whole system. But I would believe the same can be said of 2000 as well.

If given the choice, I would gladly go back to 98SE as soon as possible, as this OS is much simpler and less cumbersome. (And my computer is a bit slow to run XP with ease as well) However, I don't have the Second Edition of 98 and cannot find it anywhere, so I am basically stuck with XP since 98 (first edition) is lacking connection sharing. Either that, or I couldn't make it work, your choice. And I don't recall having much issues with stability back in those days when I used 98 either.

Suicide Junkie · #4 November 27th, 2003, 01:43 PM

Connection sharing? Why not just grab an inexpensive router (or hub if your ISP gives you multiple IPs) and be done with it?

tesco samoa · #5 November 27th, 2003, 01:52 PM

Terran C... WinXP.

The code is updated from win2k.

Both are good OS's And both will run what you need.

But Win2k is getting up there in the years and will be unsupported soon enough. Where Xp still has a few years left in it....

Security... Their both flawed. Its MS. And its open concept.

Accessiblity. Both are good. Except that XP does not have the power user level. Its either all or nothing..

Game Compatibility. Possibly win 2k... But xp will play most games

Stability. Their the same

Anything. XP makes a nice little gaming machine. But win 2k does as well...

At least with win 2k you can install something on your computer hardware side without making the call.

Alneyan · #6 November 28th, 2003, 02:55 AM

There is a router, but it doesn't seem to be automatically working. Or rather, I cannot make it work correctly to share the connection without using some software. (No wonder given my computer literacy skills which are almost nil) *Grumbles*

Loser · #7 November 27th, 2003, 03:10 PM

I got this question a lot back when I was doing onsite computer support for home and small business Users. Here's my typical answer.

If you have Win2k there is no real need to go to XP (termination of support had not yet occurred). If you have 98SE, and your machine has sufficient power (we recommended 750+ MHz, 256 Mb RAM minimum) then XP where you want to go. If you have ME then you need to get something, anything, else on there right away. What a dog.

I always disabled the automatic update. If you disable this, nothing will ever be installed without your specifically choosing to install it.

If the user was interested in performance I would disable all the shiny-happy crap in XP, it ended up looking like 2k.

Activation was trivial. You either connect into them over the internet, use one of their dial-up numbers, or even just made a phone call and read strings of letters or numbers to the rep, who then gave your letters or numbers back (I don't remember the specifics of their codes).

XP Home is fine, as long as you do not need to log into a domain. If I recall correctly, the only differences between Home and Pro was that Pro could log into a domain, could be accessed remotely with that keen built-in feature, and could support file-level sharing. I think that was about it.

I hope Thermo hits this thread. He always has informative things to say about Microsoft's products.

My XP Pro box does not crash. Ever. My Win98SE file server is in desperate need of yet another reload (I think this time I'm going to put that super-GUI Linux distro, Xandros, on it), my old Win98, 98SE, and 95 machines crashed all the time, and ME was purged from the house only a month, or so, after it was introduced. Heck, even the Win2k 'guest machine' is having problems, though that is more likely related to what the 'guests' have been doing to it than inherent vulnerabilities in the OS.

[edit: that should be file-level permissions, not file-level sharing, and I should add that Home and PRo use the same kernel: other than a few features, they are the same OS]

[ November 27, 2003, 13:13: Message edited by: Loser ]