Windows 2000 Or Windows XP

GUI

What do you use.
I want real statistics on this so
one vote per id people.

I think win2k kicks xp ass on a number of levels.
I wanna see what the bulk of ye think

zAbbo

Xp can be slighlty bloaty, but if you take off all the crap, its the best OS out there for games/multimedia etc.

michaelanthony

Microsoft has acknowledged Windows 2000 with Service pack as it's best OS yet.

Yurmasyurda

XP's incredibly stable! More so than 2000

I've used both operating systems from the time they were released and xp hasn't crashed on me once unlike 2000, it has a more stable feel also and if you don't like the bulk packaging, remove it! I didn't like the look but I've sorted that out, it now looks like windows 3.11

michaelanthony

Service pack 2

Polonious

Service pack 2

Na, SP 3 is out now. Go with the latest...

jim_rebels

I use Win2K Pro and Server and when I lived in the Capital (not the real one mind you) I was involved in an XP roll out in a certain company in Sandyford and didn't think the modifications from 2000 to XP were anything spectacular and I hate the new GUI.
IMHO Win2k is better.

Saruman

XP!! Turn off the eye candy and you have a more stable version of windows 2000 with more support for the latest hardware etc...

GUI

Microsoft has acknowledged Windows 2000 with Service pack as it's best OS yet.

url please?

ya i was on win2k beta program..
it went through many stages but :-)
since rc1 came out ..
it showed all the signs of a quality product..

turned out that way too

dahamsta

I've only ever used XP on other people's computers in here, and once for a full installation, however I dislike using it intensely. I suppose it's because I'm a power user, but I find the GUI just short of offensive.

Looking at buying a new rig shortly, the first thing I'll do is wipe XP and install Win2K. And good riddance.

adam

GUI

XP!! Turn off the eye candy and you have a more stable version of windows 2000 with more support for the latest hardware etc...

tell me ur gonna use a generic driver
compared to the newest build of a driver release from the
actual manufacturer of a product?

example.head of nvidia driver development said, that after a period of 6-9 months when a card has been out,if the original driver was stable..
they then go tweaking the driver,enabling features that enable hardware to perform 20% better.

i know xp shipped with a 13,000 driver library but
it had to didnt it :-)

Saruman

Eh of course! I was not reffering to video/sound drivers... I was talking about built in support for latest hardware like card readers, firewire, Digital Cameras etc.. Dont even neet drivers for a lot of these on the market if you just want to use the basic features... 2000 may have some support too but not to the same extent.

ando

2000 professional is the best home OS out there IMO.

GUI

Eh of course! I was not reffering to video/sound drivers... I was talking about built in support for latest hardware like card readers, firewire, Digital Cameras etc.. Dont even neet drivers for a lot of these on the market if you just want to use the basic features... 2000 may have some support too but not to the same extent.

Still its only common sense to download the latest drivers for the usb device..
and 99% of these devices come with driver from manufacturer

silly argument really :-)

Zascar

I find that as long as the computer is relativly new, and all the components are 100% XP compatible, and with SP1, XP is is superior to 2000. But then again, I like all the eye candy. I use Win2000 in work and it does crash from time to time when heavy laden...

Ronan|Raven

Windows 2000 sp2 all the way. By far miles better than XP and all its little issues.

Cake Fiend

I'm still waiting for someone to give me a real reason why 2K is better than XP. Note to llamas: the fact that it 'looks funny' is not a proper reason.

GUI

Windows 2000 WAS the best O/S Microsoft had until they upgraded it, bolted extra features onto it, made it look prettier, made the visual style customisable, improved the multimedia features, integrated .NET functionality and called the result Windows XP Professional SP1

Extra Features?

---

Device Driver Rollback
Side By Side Dll Support
System Restore

There failsafes not features

made it look prettier?

sure not bad considering they bought the dominant share in stardock technologies who invented window blinds..
but they messed it completely as you need a 500 -600mhz processor to rendor anything in real time
The luna interface is a resource hog and thats why i hate it.

Made the visual style customisable?
sorry that came with the original window blinds technology too.

integrated .Net functionality?
nope wrong there too
its an addon library thats available for all versions of
Windows from 95- to ce
And its a 20 meg seperate download

there both the same architecture, dont get me wrong there..
its the core modules , win2k starts with standards 16 services, xp 35,
modules that arent required
that add to the XP bulk onto of wizards etcc

And techie users dont want wizards and ****..

at the end of the day the operating system should be as transparent to the end user as possible,using as little footprint (take note windows xp) as possible, providing a stable platform for all uses, development,gaming etc..

Windows 2000 delivers on this.

Im a big fan of systems development and i understand they are the same architecture, same driver model , etc..
but its the extra stuff thats in xp that isnt needed !

what u like sico, 2k or xp ? ;-)

pork99

Using XP Professional on a Toshiba laptop and so far its the best MS OS I've ever used

very stable compared to ME anyway, which I'm still using on my desktop - now there is an absolute LEMON of an OS (getting a new pc next year so not too bothered about upgrading)

GUI

man there was a poll on here 3 months ago or so..
which was the worst msft os..
windows me won by 90% or something :-)

man me was a disaster :-(

I feel SO sorry for ppl who had bought a pc between june 2000
and october 2001 with windows me from the OEM on it.
it was "standard" windows consumer market os then

MarVeL

I've no huge experience with XP just yet but shallow and all as it shows me to be the "eye candy" is very nasty. Yes it can be turned off but it's so bad that it really should be turned off by default in the professional edition. Particularily annoying was th elittle karateka icon it wanted to associate with my administrator account

sceptre

Win2k on desktop, XP on laptop (actually it's treble-booting with XP, 98 and RH8)

I'm tempted to switch the two though - it's an oldish laptop (laptop has 384 megs of RAM but the 8 meg graphics card is what's slowing the thing down when XP xomes into play). Meanwhile on the desktop, that fast user switching might be nice for when I leave the PC on all night and herself wants to browse the web and type a few essays - it would be quite nice for her to be able to switch to her own profile without logging me off the Net or whatever useful things I might have running (desktop is also only a P3-500 but has a nicer graphics card).

And yeah, ME was a pile of crap.

pork99

And yeah, ME was a pile of crap.

sometimes running ME felt as if MS was sabotaging your PC

if you are really into pain I recommend ME on a Gateway PC!

milltown

I'll admit to being turned off by the "Big Brother" horror stories about product activation when XP came out first. In fact I even went Linux for a wee while to try that, but it was soo much work to get something as simple as a printer set up that I've recently reclaimed the space my Linux partition took up and handed it back to uncle Bill.
I was relatively happy with W98 until I got my laptop which came with XP Pro and W2K Pro. I tried both and found XP much more intuitive and less prone to lock ups. Now I've got XP on desktop and laptop and I'm as happy as a puppy with two peckers.
I still don't much like MS as a company but if they offer a good product I'm not going to spite myself by snubbing it.
It may be a bit power hungry but whenever a new OS comes out there are going to be people who haven't got the resources to use it. PC gamers don't waste their time moaning that UT2003 won't run on their 486 with onboard graphics and 8MB of ram. If they want to play it they upgrade, if they don't they keep their PC and carry on with Solitaire.

KdjaCL

Should have XP Pro and XP Home in the poll.

Home is cack ,Pro to me is 2000 with hardware and software support.

best Os yet imo.


(67 Win updates and 1 sp later )

kdjaC

kamobe

Everyone i know who's used XP has had problems with it, some initially, some after a few months. I've had win2k installed for 769 days, without any problems whatsoever (98 installed too for the old DOS games). Changed 98 for Xp about a year ago, various buggy problems (for me...), so i got rid of it and reinstalled 98.

2k is far better...

GUI

Everyone i know who's used XP has had problems with it, some initially, some after a few months. I've had win2k installed for 769 days, without any problems whatsoever (98 installed too for the old DOS games). Changed 98 for Xp about a year ago, various buggy problems (for me...), so i got rid of it and reinstalled 98.

agree with you 100%

Im thinking that people who are back in xp here never really went into 2000 capabilities.

GUI

same windows 2000 installation here for nearly a year and a half.

PiE

XP Pro on PC's
Win98 on laptop (due to the fact it needs a BIOS update to support Win2k or XP )

Used Win2k for a few months before I had XP, both excellent tbh, but I'll go with XP 'cos I can't remember it screwing up once, even on my Celeron333Mhz machine.

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

pork99

its interesting if you go into System Properties on XP and change the Visual Effects properties to "Adjust fo best performance" you get something that looks & behaves much the same as w2k

unfortunately that does nothing about those horrible plastic-looking icons!

TacT

2k pro.

Woden

my story, computer originally came with ME, which crashed lots but i don't see why it was the worst os what was different from 98?

upgraded to 2kpro however found for some reason it really slowed my computer down, especially notable in the boot-up time, switched xp pro about 6 months ago and am very happy with it and was looking forward to getting it, i like the look of it and retain most of the interface that came with it.

i also think the xp pro is the most stable yet, personally it has never crashed for me, however i left the mother playing solitaire on it one night and got called out of bed to find the blue screen of death to this day i have no idea what she did to it

as regards to everyone at least one problem with xp thats to be expected with a new o/s i bet when 2k came out everyone has at least one problem with it don't think its much of an issue though theres usually a small download to fix it.

so basically xp pro

ondafly

Well im running Win2K pro on 3 of my desktops. Love it to be honest, never crashed, something win98SE used to do alot of. recently bought a laptop with XP on it. Deceided to try it out and give it a fair go.

First copied over some Emulators for it, which i might add work perfectly on Win2K on all service packs. Only MAME would work for me. So tried Hitman - no joy. Gave up after that, fresh install of Win2K , bloody battery lasts longer now, and all the emulators work, and of course hitman too!

I'll admit i liked the colour usage on XP, and the backrounds, but these are only simple things.

Bard

Originally posted by daveirl
I think XP is the business. The fact is that it has everything Win2K has and then some.

People keep going on about the supposedly bad eye candy. Well change it. Personally I use StyleXP url]http://www.tgtsoft.com/[/url to customize how my PC looks and it's fantastic.

I've had XP running a whole year know and haven't had the OS crash even once.

agreed... apart from the crashing part... a certain freeware open source app crashed it once, that was all - BSOD, memory dump, reboot - back to normal (same app did the same thing on 2K so I'm not bothered - bad memory management in the app). Apart from that, it's run faster and more efficiently for me than any previous O/S, booting up and shutting down in double quick time and just generally functioning in a more streamlined and friendly way. Like I said when I first started playing with XP ... "Ah, Microsoft finally got it right!" ... as far as MS are concerned right now, it's top of the range (well... top of the 'released to the public' range )

As for StyleXP ... YES ! Lovely little program! My Windows XP now looks like OSX (I even nabbed that little ObjectDock program from Stardock to top it off ... don't use it much though). You'd be surprised how much easier on the eyes an OSX look is, especially if, like me, you have fairly sensitive eyes.

To be honest, I don't see the point in plumping for Windows 2000 over XP on a new machine - especially if the reason given is that it's been out longer and so is more "tried and tested". XP is 2000 with a bunch of updates, extra features, bug fixes, extra and more up-to-date drivers and visual bells and whistles. ... Oh, and the bells and whistles can be disabled, of course.

Then again, I tend not to just stick with the one O/S... because I tend not to just stick with the one machine. At the moment, I use a customised Win XP SP1 on a laptop, Win 2000 Pro on a home PC and Mac OSX Jaguar on an iMac. The iMac is for work - the other two are for both work and play.

halkar

Once I opened side of my camcorder,
It had a Ilink firewire connection,
I thought me get a cable to stick in there,
And I did ,
Stick the other end to the computer,
Computer did some wizardy things,
And all finished ,
Asked me if I want to open the Movie Maker,
I said "h@lly Sh!t" !!

XP rocks, if you have new hardware XP is best. I have just build a computer without using a single disk provided by the manufacturers and everything I have used with Usb and Firewire works great. I think M$ got it right after all
Running XP in work from the day it arrived no crashes and no nasty suprises :cool:

Cake Fiend

I've been using XP since one of the later pre-releases, I admin 62 XP machines and I've never had a major problem with the OS. I've never had major problems with 2000 either, but I prefer XP because I see it as 2K with extras (the unwanted of which can easily be disabled).

Runfree

Windows 2000 is much better. When I upgraded my computer from windows 98 to XP I had the problem that I lost all my drivers. Thank bit of god I have them all on Cd and backed up on another CD. I still have problems with XP.

When i done this procedure with Win 98 to 2000 I had no problems and my friend doesn't seem to have any problems (except that time he deleted the display drivers. got those back in 2 minutes)

I would do anything to go to 2000 but unfortunatly it wont un istall for me. can't even format the bloody thing. Bah

GUI

of course u can format it ..
whats the exact prob
u can format any disk

Runfree

Ah yea I know slight problem though. Can't remember what it is though. haven't used my home computer in bout 3 months.

Ah well. A nice magnet will do the trick

GUI

i know the prob u are talking about
xp locks out mbr..

get partition magic or whatever app
full format of file system
and write a new file system full format
and start clean install of 2k
bingo

Runfree

huh how do you know the problem if i didn't explain the problem

Chaos-Engine

Perhaps a differentiation between XP-home and XP-Pro would help more...

XP-Pro is a real contender to 2000
XP-home is **** and only serves to be good for multimedia

Either way i prefare 2000. Secure and reliable...

BUt mostly I use Debian.... feck Microwhores

Woden

i've had no problems formatting my hard drive when windows xp was installed, leave the windows cd in your cd drive, it will be detected when the computer boots and then you can format from there and then install any operating system you want. also upgrading from 98 to xp you should have had all the xp drivers ready or at least your modem.

po0k

IO've been running 2k for the last 18 months.
I am very pleased with it.
Any time i've ever tried to do anything with XP it's been nothing but an obstacle in my way, from configuring network settings to just browsing the hard drive.
Whatever about the underlying OS in XP Pro (home isn't a contender for anything tbh. Marginally above ME), the GUI is a shambles.
I shouldn't have to turn off anything to simply be able to use the machine.
2k does the business for me, I'm very happy with it, just reformatted this christmas after about 13 months of one install, and only really did that cos I b0rked a driver install recently and couldn't be arsed sorting throgh the mess of crap I'd downloaded over the time.
I had Mandrake 8.2 on the drive too, that was ok, but I'm going throwing Debian 3 onto it as soon as I get the discs off a mate.

zekiel

Windows 2k is number 1 due to the fact that its more likely to have most peripherals work with it and have better support from most hardware vedors also software tends to run that little bit better than xp pro.

Windows xp pro is pretty good (very stable) and in the near future will become number 1 but it's just not there yet.

Windows xp home... just burn it -- burn it now.

Ryo Hazuki

Just wondering,

Is it possible to download Win2000 service packs as a single file eg zip or cab file.

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

Woden

bit off topic but whats everybodies big hang up with xp home, i think its the best "home" o/s that ms have ever thrown out, better then all the 9x's and ME (wouldn't be difficult). i also think the similarities with home to pro was a good idea and that a causal user would have no problems using a computer with pro after running home.

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

sceptre

Originally posted by daveirl
They think it makes them sound like they're really shit hot with PCs, that's why they bash it. They bash XP in general not just XP Home.

I seem to recall people saying the same thing about Win95 when it first came out.

XP is a great OS if you've got the hardware to support it well. The same could obviously not have been said about WinME which added very little to anyone's Windows experience

The merging of the code base is a great step forward - there will evetually be no need to keep dual-booting between an NT OS and a 9x OS just so you can have stability and also run the latest games. Bashing XP Home doesn't make much sense - there isn't a long list of things that can be done using XP Pro that can't be done using XP Home. Joining a domain is an obvious one but there are relatively simple ways around that, it turns out.

I'd limit specific XP bashing to the Media Center version but that's also filling a specific niche in the market, will run all XP apps that run on other varieties so where's the problem there?

Dislike of the eye candy is fair enough (though see comment about win95 above - it was the main reason some people didn't likt 95 when it came out). Easy to change it/turn it off. Not a problem. I don't like the new Start Menu (at least not yet). I've turned it off. Easy peasy. I like XP. To each his own though, I suppose.