From W95 to 2000

[luisr]

Hi there. I am running Windows 95 in my system and very shortly I will be finally upgrading my Windows.

I have been recommended Windows 2000 over ME. The person who did this has built systems for many people and tells me that he has had quite some people come back to Windows 98 after trying Windows ME.

As far as I understand, Windows 2000 is the latest incarnation of Windows NT. Is that true?

General comments on the advantages of 2000 over ME, please.

[HAL9000]

I personally don't have any problem with WinME. I see all over the internet people ranting and raving how bad it is, how unstable, etc, but realistically, I heard all of this when Win98 was released and everyone shouted stay with Win95. Now everyone complains about WinME and claims Win98 to be better. I find it rather hard to believe that I can upgrade both of my systems by installing over top of Win98 with WinME and my work machine which originally had Win95 got 98, then 98SE, then ME loaded over top and all of them run flawlessly. The only glitch I ran across was my system with dual voodoo2 cards and an ATI AIW needed the "special purpose" ATI driver to work properly, but other than that, everything is OK. As for Win2K, unless you have some good CPU speed and plenty of RAM, I wouldn't bother with it as it can be a real slow pig. My choice is WinME.

Oh, and yes, Win2K is the latest version of WinNT.

[Cymbeline]

I would probably go with Windows 2000. One of my friends wanted ME installed on his computer. It worked, until some of his friends put too much stress on the computer (playing Quake 3 Arena, surfing the web using IE, AIM, and Yahoo! Chess at the same time), and the computer no longer worked properly. The Restore utility didn't fix the problem. :-(

I then installed Windows 2000 and it hasn't hiccuped when the stresses are applied. I wouldn't recommend it for running servers. That's the realm of Linux. :-)

One warning: if you do install Windows 2000, and you have an ATI card based on the Rage 128 chipset, you might have to remove the card if you encounter lockups during the hardware detection. You can safely reinstall the card after installation.

Cymbeline

[Floppyman]

What are the specs of your system? Windows 2000 runs good on a fairly speedy system, if you have fairly fast system you will be fine, but if it is slower I recommend staying with 95 or 98/ME. I myself dual boot between 98 and win2k on a dual cpu machine, I haven't tried ME yet, as I too have not heard great things about it, will probaly wait till the first service pack comes out:) Also if you game a lot and have a lot of games that are only supported in windows 95/98 chances are they won't work in win2k, which in my experience, is not the greatest operating system for gaming in the first place. I get better performance in 98. I do agree that it is more stable though. Only reason I did get it though is a rather critical one; I have dual cpu's and win95/98/ME don't support SMP while win2k does. HTH