XP or W2K for workstations?

daughters

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with

yes,

noticeable

I think it comes down to a dollar and cents issue. Will XP support the existing software? Has it been tested? Will you have to purchase another XP/2000 license for the system? What is the cost of this upgrade? What about man hours?

I have never been a fan of XP, but it's getting better, especially if using the "not so friendly" options with the latest updates. Ultimately if you can afford the change and it does not burden your staff I would upgrade.

Brett

daughters

direct

Classic mode my a**.... If there is a global switch for classic mode please let me know. There is a classic mode for the control panel, and then you can go right click your butt off all over the place, looking for ways to make it "classic", and you still wind up with a grossly invasive OS. However, I know nothing about this tgtsoft thing of which you speak, and I am interested in that..

Have had some compatibility probs with win2k and win95, and I would suspect most any Win is going to have problems with certain DOS programs. And I found out firsthand that you should never try to use the standard 8259 (IIRC) DMA controller while running under Windoze. As one might detect, I am not a Windows fan at all, but the original poster asked to avoid MS bashing, and just give an opinion. Given the option of W2K and XP, I would definitely choose W2K.

Regards, cgs

that

I never understood clear type. It annoyed me making text appear as different colors. On my laptop it's standard only.

please

It's not so much a global switch, but a few settings that takes 5 minutes to setup.

1- Enable Classic Mode for Control Panel 2- Task Bar and Start Menu Properties, under the start menu, will allow you to select a classic start menu. 3- Using Display properties set the theme to Windows Classic.

There is probably a tool which does all of this and more out there.

suspect

would

PIC (8259) Hardware Is Slow The PIC interrupt controller has a built-in hardware priority scheme that is not appropriate for machines running operating systems based on Windows NT Technology. To address this problem, a different hardware priority scheme is used by the operating system.

Sounds to me that it's just crappy hardware. Since DOS is a virtual machine on Windows NT, it's safer, but does not allow direct access to hardware. Finally most if not all windows compatibility issues are caused by poor assumptions by developers (or developer laziness) which can often be corrected by tricking the software in to making the "right" assumptions (which is what XP does in compatibility mode iirc).

David Brown wrote: ...

...

IMO, win2k was the height of performance with non-invasiveness from M$. From there, it's all down hill. I switched to Debian linux.

hardware

buying

you

de-activate

And so far Microsoft has bent over backwards to uphold my OEM license which says I can only install it the first system it was installed on. I have installed it (without pirating) on about 5 or 6 different systems at different times and while they do warn me, they do allow me to keep using XP. This is completely in line with their EULA.

To install updates. It can be disabled or customized to warn, etc. It is not enabled by default.

This provides consumers with a benefit so they don't have to worry about keeping their system up to date.

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Microsoft does this by embracing and extending, not "disabling" software.

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BTW, SP4 is out and they toned down the language.

Brett

SP4 is out.

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Hi Scott,

Not that I disagree with most of the Pro-2K/Anti-XP comments thus far, but if this is for commercial use you have the issue of support and compatability. Microsoft is very upgrade-pushy. As much as we all don't like it, if you go Windows its very painful to stubbornly stay with what Microsoft sees as "old" versions.

For example, the official roadmap says most Win2K licenseing schemes (including retail) will end 3/31/2004. That's not too far away!

See more information here:

Good luck, Ryan

Would that include using the parallel port or is the hardware still protected from big bad developers and their BDM cables?

Yaakov

For parallel ports, the solution has been GIVEIO.SYS (or similar) ever since the days of NT 3.

--
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker@physik.rwth-aachen.de)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.

No single global switch, but you get most of it in 3 steps you can do in 30 seconds. Open the control panel and do the following:

1) select "Windows Classic" theme in Display Properties. 2) select "Classic Start Menu" in Taskbar/Start Menu Options. 3) select "Use Windows Classic Folders" in Folder Options.

The XP GUI is instantly back to Win98 with Active Desktop semantics. You can turn off almost all of the Active Desktop crap using the advanced options for the Start Menu and Folders. Some of the visual effects are now in the Advanced performance section in the System options.

Getting a nice, basic, NT4 style desktop takes about 5 minutes of twiddling the advanced options.

George