Forum Moderators: phranque
Athlon 1300 XP
512 MB Ram
120 GB HD (you know, like I *have* to try all the software ;) )
DVD
CD RW
and was thinking what OS to use. Currently on all the PC's we have 98 SE. So what would be the best option for this new PC?
Win 98 SE
Win 2000
Win XP
I have heard a lot about XP but have never tried it? anyone care to share their experience with above OS?
Thanks for the help.
The way of the future will be XP which is really just 2000 for consumers (read extra bells+whistles and product activation), 98 OTOH is not as stable as the others as it's still based on the 9X core but is going to be properly backwards compatible with applications and games.
My advice would be go with 2000 for the moment if you value speed over beauty because it's very stable, is pretty lean & mean (as windows goes) and you don't have to deal with product activation and so you can happily tweak, repartition, reformat and re-install 'til your heart's content without a worry.
When the next version of windows trots along in a year or two then you can judge if it's worth the upgrade or whether you can live with 2000 for another year or two.
On the other hand if you want an easy life and aren't ultra techical then you should get along just fine with XP as it is just as stable as 2000 if not more so but it has the advantage of being designed with the typical desktop user in mind rather than paying homage to it's NT heritage.
- Tony
The whole office switched over awhile back, and I also upgraded my home computers to XP, with very few problems*
Previously, I had Win 2000 installed and I would make the change again.
- Chad
*This is a Microsoft product we are talking about, so, I consider a few problems as acceptable. ;)
I didn't like XP. Thought it was too cartoonish, and it was a resource hog.
But how can you say which is best? It's all open to opinion.
If you're getting a new computer, you might as well get the latest OS. It's not like you get a lot of choices......
That would be a question I would ask.
I guess after all this posts, I should totally forget about Win 98 ;)
On weekends I do play lot of games and I guess from that point of view XP seems good, however, my main concern with XP is
* How often does it contact its maker (M$) and what info does it send back? or it just contacts one time during installation?
Onya
Woz
AFAIK, XP only phones home once in the begining, unless you make a major hardware change. Then it phones home again.
I set up my machine as a dual boot (98SE/XP). I wanted to test it before committing to moving everthing over to a relatively new OS and I have to say that XP is getting the nod more and more.
It's almost like having a new machine, 533Mhz K6 with 256MB, to me. And I haven't had a single crash yet.
<added>..or..what Korkus just said..! :)</added>
Piece of advice. Never buy into an M$ OS until it has gone through at least 2 minor upgrades. For example v1.0 is the initial release - wait until v 1.2 or 1.3. XP - far too new. Better if you can wait for the first Service Pack to be released.
Come to think of it - it's a bad sign when I measure the stability of an OS by what SP they release...
But in any event, it was very clear that 98SE was no way as good as 2k or XP - but I will also agree with Brett about few software not working on XP.
Bear in mind Win2K has a few nice extras over Win2k such as remote desktop and built-in CD writing: much of the CD writing software for Win2k will blue screen your machine, so that can be a little nasty..
