Best Windows on an older PC?

N

NRS

New member
I'm about to do a fresh reinstall on an old 500mhz Pentium 2 with a 10 gb HD and 128 mb of ram and have my choice of installing either Windows 98se, Windows 2000, or Windows XPpro w/sp2. I dont plan on running any major apps or anything, just the basics (internet, office & light photo editing) so I dont care if I cant run Windows XP's Movie Maker or anything, I just wont use such features. The machine already had XPpro on it so I know it ran okay for just the basics, I was just wondering if an earlier version of Windows might run even more efficiantly on it.
 
+2 on Win2K. We have an old Dell 450mhz, 256MB of RAM that runs Win2K fine (Office apps, internet stuff)
 
+3 on W2K. EVERYONE of our computers here at my work run W2K though a upgrade will come soon for upping all systems to XP. W2K is the most stable windows that was created, or 2K3.
 
Aren't you limited to audio interfaces using older versions of Windows? Some of the interfaces I've been looking at only work with XP.
 
sajs said:
Aren't you limited to audio interfaces using older versions of Windows? Some of the interfaces I've been looking at only work with XP.
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yeah but all he wants to do is email, surf, & documents
 
My old POS that I record on has 2000 on it....actually does pretty well. We have 3 older machines that have 2000, and while not barnburners, they are stable.
 
Wow, fairly solid concensus so far in favor of 2000. Is this just out of general preference or is there some other reason I should be using 2000 over XP on this machine?

I also did some further research which informed me the two OS's are basically the same but XP just has a few more bells and whistles than 2k. Its minumum hardware specs are the same and even benchmarks are very close, but this is usually done on newer machines so its hard to know if theres a bigger bloat factor in XP that I'm not accounting for. Even then, there seems to be plenty of tweak guides that tell you how to disable all those resource hungry extras that you dont need.

I must admit though, if the PC goes bad, 2000 has the definate advantage of being able to pop out the HD and reuse it on another machine. Assuming both OS's really do run at equal speed and stability though, wouldnt it be logical that XPpro w/SP2 would be better just because it has the most recent security and driver updates already built into it as well as better compatabilty with more programs? Is there something else I'm missing here about 2000 that would make it the better choice?

Thanks
 
Well, I've personally never had a crash with 2000 and have had quite a few with XP. If you're connecting to the internet without a medium (firewalled router or a firewall), then you will want either XP, or a decent firewall for 2000 (there are free ones out there). 2000, in my experiences, also seems to use less resources than XP (even with most every tweak you can find). It all really comes down to personal preference. I like having total control over my system, and 2000 is the closest that MS is probably going to get. I don't like bloated menus or extraneous "user-friendliness" so XP does nothing but piss me off.
 
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