Alright, just to get things rolling...right now i'm running 98se. if all of my games worked on linux i'd be using it just to spite (in my own less than a drop in the bucket way) microsoft. 98 works well for me and is stable on my comp. why should i ug to 2k?

You probably shouldn't. W2k is a business OS, and not designed for the home user (hence not all games work with it).

I know, I know. That's not the geek answer. That's the real world answer. Wait till Whistler, then upgrade.

well ME was supposed to be the "home user" OS, but it did some bad things to a friend's comp and i just didn't see enough to convince me that it was worth it. as for 2k being for bussines...dual GHz athlons would be good for runing business apps on...bryce 4 and photoshop probably weren't designed with the weekend user in mind but are still cool.

I'm using Win2k at home. Even at home I'm connected to LAN and I need some security settings that 98 doesn't provide. Besides, 98 wasn't stable on my machine (to be exact: 98 was, 98 SE wasn't). Win2k is the most stable Windows version I've used. I've had also NT 4.0 but NT means definitely no games. I'm not a big gamer but the games I like DO run with Win2k (like NFS5). NFS4 doesn't though... If 98 works stable for you, stick with it. Win2k memory requirements is another story. I experience mem usage over 200 MB every day. 128 MB is sane minimum of RAM to run Win2k smoothly.

You should upgrade!!
I am an avid gamer, and I use Win2K pro.
First of all it is more geared towards business or server related use, but it also has a completely new re-written tcp/ip stack that is MUCH faster than the one used in win98 or 98se, in other words, the internet is faster. A lot of people say that many peices of software, and games will not work on win2K or that because of the HAL in NT bases OS's you will not get very good framerates in games, but let me tell you, I have a celeron 366 192Mb pc-100 RAM, a voodoo3000 pci, and I play a lot of games on my system. Basically Win2K may be based on NT but it no longer has a HAL (hardware abstaction layer) therefore, software(such as a game) can communicate directly with a peripheral (such as a graphics card, instead of having to communicate via the HAL. Also most all new games are written with Win2K in mind, and many older games, i.e. games released before Win2K, have made patches available on their websites.

These are the games that I have played on my Win2K machine:

1.Unreal
2.Unreal Tournament
3.Half-Life
4.C&C Tiberian Sun
5.C&C Red Alert 2
6.Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2
7.Rouge Spear
8.Motocross Madness
9.Monster Truck Madness
10.Quake I,II,and III Arena
11.Need for Speed III
12.Mech Warrior 3
13.Jane's Flight Sim IAF
14.Soldier of Fortune
15.Diablo II
16.and there are more that I just cant think of.

Just to wrap up, I would say that you should definately upgrade, because of the overall performance increase. You will never have to deal with your system hanging up and having to unplug it to restart, if something does go awry Win2K deosn't crash, it simply tells you that it will write a log file for you, that you can look at at a later time!!

Actually.. W2K does have a Hal.

i agree with garfield. not only is w2k stable, it is also less annoying when a program crashes. also it is more secure with the use of ntfs. i got a 10GB partition with only 512bytes per sector. let's see win98/me do that.

also w2k includes IIS, Internet Information Services which might help you learn about how to run a web server, though not quite <i>legally</i> is using residential internet connections...

Hey,

Ok Win2k is much more stable. It is a buisness OS. Microsoft did release a few patches helping it out with games. Many game designers are making there games compatible with Win2k. I do notice more problems with games when it comes to The Opengl subsystem. You'll need to be running D3D games. You'll have to deal with more graphical isssues, but if it crashes you experience less problems. Its a toss up. Some games worked better for me, some didn't work at all.

Timothy Stankus
One of the First AMD Athlon Users =)

Ok, Games are slower in win2k. This is a widely acknowleged fact. How important this is to you is for you to decide. However your last statement is the most relevant: "98 works well for me and is stable on my comp."

Unless there is a specific feature of win2k you want, I don't see any reason to upgrade. If your computer is already stable, you can't make it more stable, but it could get worse. I'd also advise staying away form WinME.

For games, a lot will depend on what video card you have and how much time that manufacturer has invested in its Win2K drivers. I have helped several friends install Win2K and have observed that 3dFX cards do not seem to do very well in Win2K. The cards I have direct experience with are the Voodoo Banshee, Voodoo3 2000, and Voodoo3 3000. All three of these had decent performance under 98 but really seemed to take a nose dive under 2K. I have no experience with the 4500 and higher cards but from some of the reviews I've seen it seems to be the same situation.

On the other hand, my system with a Diamond Viper II is great under Win2K. I know a lot of you will say that the savage 2000 sucks, but mine really came alive under win2K. My performance in win2K is significantly better than in 98 with this card. Last night for example I was playing QIIIa at 1280x1024 and 32 bit with no problems at all (dont have a way to measure frame rates and dont care since it looks good). The point is that this card'd problem was allways its crummy drivers. But S3 (just before it left the business) seemed to really work hard on this Win 2K driver which made all the difference.

You are incorrect about one thing: Windows 2000 DOES have a Hardware Abstraction Layer, or HAL. Here is a link to an MS support article that talks about the HAL in Win2k:

"http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q237/5/56.asp"

The reason that so many games work so well on Win2k is that they have been written to use DirectX instead of talking to hardware directly. In Win2k, DirectX has been integrated so games can talk to DirectX, which talks to the HAL which talks to the hardware and everything works!

Recently I set up Mobil 1 Rally, with the Microsoft force-feedback wheel on my system (Win2k on a PIII 600EB) and it works flawlessly. Note that neither the game nor the wheel list Windows 2000 as "supported", but they still work!

Neat!

alright, well thanks to everyone. i think i will ug to 2k.

I think you shouldn't upgrade because it has less illegal operation problem which really spoil the fun.

Anyway, getting real, just a word of caution: If you *uck up Win2K, it is usually very serious problem -- There is no Real DOS to help you out.

After viewing many of the replies to your post, I'd have to say I agree "the most" (hehe) with Murdly Gurdson. WIN2K was never meant to be for home users or an alternative to WIN9.x

who cares what they meant if for? it'll still work and if it's more stable i'll be happy.

All i can say about win2k is that it is an excellent operating system, by microsoft standards. I regularly take two machines to lan games to run as dedicated servers. The win2k machine i can run 5+ dedicated quake3arena servers at once, and with the win98se box i can only run 2 (same spec machines). Over a 2 day lan event i'll have to reboot the win98 machine every 3 - 4 hours, after 48 hours win2k is stil going great and with minimal lag difference between first boot and 48 hours later. (Talking some 5gig of traffic over 38 hours)

Sure Win2k has higher memory requirements, but my installation of Win2k Pro only uses (on boot up) 38MB of RAM. Its just a matter of turning off the services you don't need, and you can save a stack of RAM. Did you realise that using a moderate size JPEG file for a background under windows (1024x768 jpeg stretched to 1280x1024) will use approximately 8MB of RAM alone!

Tune your system and you will find that Win2k Pro will run happily on 64MB. Only that each dedicated quake 3 arena server uses about 50MB each... I run with 256MB in each machine, my win98 is about to be upgraded to win2k.

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Ian McGinley
parawolf

Wow, I'd be extemely interested in knowing how you got your bare-bones boot up to only use 38mb. I usually sit at around 50mb. Can you post a list of what services you disabled? That's really cool.

Well I'm a gamer and I'm running Win2k. Even though I've got a Banshee, so far everything has worked fine - however a friend with a V3 isn't that lucky, he switches to 98 whenever he wants to play anything.
Win2k is surprisingly stable - it's not like there are no more crashing applications, they just don't take the system with them. I don't think I was forced to restart the system for some weeks or even months now.

Currently I am running on w2k with tons of apps running (blackice, icq, winamp, ntvirus etc.) and now according to taskmon i'm eating up 190MB of memory!! . Have been running for 7 days none stop. Perfect OS, at least to me.

Morgan 1.6Ghz + 256DDR = Dream on
However dreams are approacable

Well it totally depends on your hardware configuration and even more so on what services you do need. There are plenty of help files on this.

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Ian McGinley
parawolf

Isn't it interesting to note that this post started with "convince me" and now it is all about how good w2k is? lol

Morgan 1.6Ghz + 256DDR SDRAM = Dream on
However dreams are approacable

hehe, no kidding. occasionaly for a bit of masochistic fun i'll open as many beta progs as i can find and count the number of old 3.1 errors i can get in a night. if my games would work i'd gladly go back to using dos.