win2k also for the games...i think it is the better of the MS OSes :rolleyes:

Yes I still use windows: 95;98 and me. but thats only three of my drives amongst the total 12 which are constantly changing linux/unix drives. I gave up on BeOS. Belive it or not I would have an intel (windows) made box over a mac any day.
I also got the latest Linux Format with instructions on building the ultimate linux box.
Still a newbe. yep , forever a NooB

Win2k, Win98SE and Win3.1 here. I really enjoy working with Win3.1, it's kinda funny :). 2000 is a pretty descent OS, I've to say... I hated XP though...

XP Pro...(for games, music and Photoshop)

Music? Games and Photoshop I can understand, but what's wrong with mpg321, xmms and mplayer, kscd, workbone, timidity? :)

RE:
 

I have all my mp3's (over 10gigs) on my Windows partition...and games..well you know the deal with that. I actually don't mind using both but the more I use and learn about *Nix the less inclined I am to using Doz.

Tsss. You forgot wine...

Re: RE:
 

I hear ya!. Still, you know, you can mount you Windows partition safely under Linux, regardless if it's ntfs or fat32, since you will use it only for reading, in this case, to listen to your mp3's ;)

I'm still learning. I'm trying to figure out why I cant rip tracks (off the CD) in Rhythm Box..when I click on it to rip songs the progress bar just stalls.

winXP is better then 2k for gaming, IF you know how to clean out all the junk from M$, and you are running pro corp edition.

i refuse to run home and the pro retail edition is almost as bad.

both the retail vs. have spyware built into them that the corp vs does not, or at least has disabled. the pro vs is still vaild to use for gaming if you are willing to accept the fact the Mr. Gates has access to your hardware upone registration of your CD key with M$.

clean it out, get rid of the junk GUI and run in best performance mode, then msconfig and get rid of everything but the drivers and the OS. it will run rather well. better and faster then 2k at least and will look/feel just like 2k.

ME = microsoft evil and i refuse to even work on a ME system. i just sell my customers an upgrade at that point.

How exactly is XP better then 2k for gaming?. If it's because the "fancy compatibility mode", I'll have to disagree.

Both 2k and XP are equally bad for gaming. Period. WinXP "wants" to be better for gaming due a "compatibility" mode that can be applied to any exe, so that in theory would fix the issue of older games to be played under WinXP, right? Well, wrong :).

That compatibility is the most ridiculous thing I have ever seem, ever. It simply does not work, be it under 256 color mode, win95, 98, you name it.

I have a couple of older games (but not that old) that are no longer playable under Win2k or XP. On the top of my head, Blair Witch Volume One and Heavy Metal FAKK 2. There's no support for those games because, well, they are old and there's no "Win2k/XP" on the box. I've mailed the manufactures a couple of times and they could no help... and to fix it, a 1MG patch would fix both, because this "little" problem lies how the game initialize DirectX (thanks MS for mixing Direct3D with DirectDraw for that in later versions of DirectX)

Thankfully, they are DirectX based games, so you can find illegal patches around that address that issue for both 2k and XP.

XP just happens to be more used widely (illegally, by the way) then Win2k, so there's more "underground" support, as those patches, for it. But that not necessarily makes it better for games (but you can prove me wrong though ;)). Actually, I've a couple of accessories, as PSone - USB bridge, an adapter to connect PSOne/2 joypads/sticks/wheel to a PC via USB. It simply won't provide any force-feed back under WinXP, but does in 2k or older Windows versions.

True is, the best Windows for games is Windows 98SE: very easy on resources requirements, "true" DOS support for older games (in both 2K and XP, DOS is practically unusable with a fake slow emulation.. DOSbox is faster then that for Goddess sake) and if properly patched with an stable version of DirectX, games will run very stable and so will win98 (unless you play hard-codec games from EA Games as Ice Hockey, Formula One, Fifa Soccer... because they just run if they want to...).

WinXP is just a lame try from MS to bind NT Technologies with Win32 and fails....

xp is better for gaming because xp is the only os that any games are made for and no starcraft for mac os does not count

old hardware, and old software will always run better on older OSs. they were built to run around each other.

sorry, but win9x systems can not compair to the stability of win2k or XP for modern gaming platforms. both of witch are better then linux due to the vast majority of games written for DX, thus you get sloppy ports from wineX into linux.

that is not saying that they will not play, or will not be stable, but you will not get the performance you do when its played native. now yes some manufacturs have built linux native code for a small % of games on the market and those will run as good if not better then they do on windows.

win9x is not a multitasking OS, nor will it ever compete in the ability to handle the loads that XP or 2k can deal with. if you do not crack the registry you can never use more then 512M ram for anything as that will lead to a crash in the OS and make it even more unstable then it is nativly.

with 2k and xp you can run up to 4G of ram and not crash the OS because it is designed to handle that amount of hardware power.

what makes xp better then 2k is the driver support. 2k still does not have the full driver support that xp has for both legacy and current hardware when it comes to gaming.

win98 was a great gaming platform without a doubt, but it can not keep up with the modern games, the modern hardware, or the resources both require. so yes for gaming the best platform out there for stability, ease (not the stupid compatability thing that as you said is junk, but will ease some of the stress of some of the semi older games. less then 4yrs old) power, and compatability.

why? simple. games are built to run on it. that is why. that is why PS2 and Nintindo Cube have stable games. why? their games are built to run on that hardware/os.

a game that is so old to run on a N64 system will not/can not run on a newer game platform. why? its not built for it. that is why your older games that were built for win98 do not run well on newer OSs.

go buy a new modern game, less then 4 years old, and you will be hard pressed to get it to run as well on win98SE as you do on a clean winXP system. if you get 90% of them to run better on win98SE vs XP, you just do not know what you are doing when it comes to winXP.

its that simple.

Oh yeah, for new games you are totally correct. I've tested a not so old game, Grand Theft Auto 3 on the same computer with Win98 and XP. You simply cannot compare how much faster GTA3 ran in WinXP compared to Win98 :). However, the differences between Win2k and XP, in this particular case, are none ;). I'd stick with Win2k a lot longer for gaming though, maybe someday I will be back to XP, but we never know :)

Based on my personal experience I’d to say that Windows 2000 (for now on 2000) is basically the same as Windows XP (for now on XP) regarding hardware and software compatibility. By the way 2000 is NT5.0 while XP is NT5.1.

XP has better hardware support for some newer hardware from vendors that are cheap enough for not supporting Windows 2000, and in the majority of the cases the same driver works on Windows 2000 as well. Because XP is newer than 2000 it has native support for more hardware, nothing that a simple driver installs can’t fix.

I believe there is not any software compatibility difference between 2000 and
XP. The mentioned compatibility mode was present in 2000 but it was disable after installing a service pack -I’m not sure which one it was-, I believe this was done to give XP a fake advantage over 2000; anyway, all my software still runs the same way like if it is auto selecting compatibility mode if needed.

I find the most common problems to running older software –both games and applications- on any NT based OS (not including server versions) are video related and user privileges, i.e.:
1) You need to be an administrator to access video hardware the way some older Windows games do, even if it’s only in 2D mode
2) DirectX version availability on Windows NT 4.0
3) Visual artifacts due to specific video drivers and software versions

About the comment on XP Professional Retail vs. Corporate Edition been different. I’d to say that the only difference I found is that the activation system is disable (for obvious reasons) on the later.

And yes, all the software that runs on 2000 runs on XP, almost all of the software that runs on 2000 and XP runs a lot faster than on any 9x based OS on the same hardware, especially on newer hardware. But a lot more stable.