XP or W2K

I have Win98 installed on my computer and WinNT on my notebook and I want to upgrade now.

My profile is
- computer and notebook
- I want to play games, also old (2 years maybe) ones
- I want to manage my digital fotos from my homepage
- I want to connect the computer and notebook with an USB-Network
- I surf the Web
- I do Office (like Word and Excel)

To what OS would you upgrade (why)? Will my games like Half-Life still run on the new OS? What exactly is the difference between XP and W2K?

I look forward hearing from you!

Stephan

 

I recommend Windows XP. It much more reliable and offers a compatibility mode feature that may let your older games run. And if you are going to upgrade why not go with the latest version. The Microsoft site also lists tons of new feature for XP.

 

The compatability is much much better than with 2000. If you have one of those older games that need a specific screen resolution to run, XP will change the resolution for you when you run the program and then change it back when you exit.

It will also install games that look for a dos kernal. We have some that would not install whatever we tried on 2000, because it would tell us that we did not have dos on our machine. Installed fine.

We had several games that would tell us that the game needed more free space to install (there was 20 gigs free). It installed.

For games and backwards compatability XP is much better than 2000.

 

Think of XP as a joining of the better parts of Windows 98 (compatibility and gaming) with the better parts of Windows 2000/NT (security and stability).

 

I just noticed that you mentioned Half-Life.

That one has some problems with XP on a clean install. To run half-life on XP, you might need to do some tweaking. Here is a link to the page.

http://www.tweakxp.com/tweakxp/display.asp?id=214

 

Before deciding to upgrade to Windows XP, make sure all your hardware is compatible. Microsoft has a compatibility checker program on its website you can run. Also, is your hardware new enough to handle Windows XP? And if you want to upgrade your laptop and your desktop computers, you will need to purchase two copies of the upgrade.