Sell me on Windows

[steveo]

Being the farm has kept me busy the past year or so I'm totally out of touch with Windows. I've been running Win98se for years it seems but I want to to upgrade this summer. So I figured by this time Windows users are probably getting well versed in the newer o/s and have formed their opinions on what's the best way to go.

So what's it gonna be?

Pound for pound what the best version of Windows available for a self respecting single PC Windows user like myself?

[Budfred]

If you are not a gamer, I would go with Win2KPro. It is stable and most hardware now has drivers for it. I would look at doing a dual boot though so you can retain the best features of Win98SE.

[Steve]

I use XP on a couple of machines, w2k on one and 98se on another. I think XP is the way to go, with a couple of conditions. 1) Some folks are still upset with the activation policy. If it doesn't bother you, go for it. 2) It runs kind of slow if you have only 256MB of RAM. 512MB is better.

If either of the above are an issue for you, then w2k will do the trick.

[Tamacracker]

do "not" get windows XP if you didnt atleast upgrade the RAM 256 is old school, you need atleast 512MB. The first time I got a copy of XP Pro the PC ran slower than windows 98 SE, a week later I just added another 256MB RAM card. This helped the problem a good enough amount to work on my PC. But I must have a leak of some sort.. it's been runnin slow, so now I think it's time to build a better reliable PC. I've had this PC for a good 6 years now with only a few upgrades here and there.

[Budfred]

Tamacracker,

You have to fine tune WinXP by shutting down a lot of the useless garbage that comes with it. It will run slow until you do. You can get instructions for doing this from BlackViper (http://www.blkviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm)