Common Theme

[NetEngineer]

Has anyone noticed a common support theme throughout all support forums...? Windows XP seems to be the common link of constipation among computing professionals... I know I've said it 4,324,875 times before...but here it goes again..... Run Win2K...stay Run away from XP...

XP=Xtremely Poor

 

[Dan O]

Millions of users use it without problems.

 

[JohnWill]

Well, some people are kinda' forced into it because it comes standard on their new PC. I will have to give XP one chunk of credit, they did a much better job than W2K of supporting all the old and oddball hardware, I'm actually quite impressed! OTOH, if you're into performance, you would be well advised to stick to W2K, since XP is significantly slower on the same hardware. I have two identical systems here that have W2K and XP on them, and it's no contest as to which one is faster at almost any task you do. One exception, with the special handling it receives, XP boots faster, but unless your machine crashes a lot, 30 seconds here isn't a factor.

For my work, my main system has W2K, because I don't want the overhead. OTOH, I have to support people with XP, so I'm forced to have a system with it installed, just so I can see what they're talking about when they go down in smoke & flames.

 

[NameTooLong]

I heard a rumor that Microsoft made XP because Windows 2000 was so stable that it wasn't a significant source of income. Knowing Microsoft, I wouldn't be surprised if there is any truth to that.

 

[crjdriver]

They are both stable os; I run both as a dual boot. My personal preference is for Win2k, however XP does have some nice features such as the restore function. I ran a benchmark [PCMark 2002] with both Win2k and XP; note this is on the same machine with up to date drivers.

Win2k pro SP3
CPU 4740
Memory 3326
Hard Drives 1248

XP pro SP1

CPU 4772
Memory 3404
Hard Drives 1215

As you can see they are very close with xp slightly ahead except in HD use.

 

[JohnWill]

I don't put much stock in benchmarks, in actual use, XP seems more sluggish for almost any application I run. OTOH, with fast enough hardware, it's probably not an issue, the W2K & XP identical systems are 800mhz P3's, so they're not exactly "start of the art".

 

[NameTooLong]

If you look at the system requirements for the game Morrowind you'll see that all other OS requires 128mb ram while XP requires 256mb ram.