Which Windows is best?

W

Wayne Morgan

XP if your computer will run it. The demands of XP are much greater than
WinME. Minimum requirements for XP are 300 MHz processor, 128 MB RAM and the
completed install will occupy about 1.5 GB of disk space. Personal
preference, don't run XP on anything less than a P3-700, 512 MB RAM and UDMA
100 hard drives. The RAM can be cut to 256 MB if you don't do much at one
time and UDMA 33 hard drives work ok, they're just a little slow.
 
M

MSN

Windows 98 Second Edition.

Will run almost all the software out there, except for those specifically
designed to get you to buy XP, and you can usually find them in warez, it
crashes...like about never...and it's easier to use than the rest put
together. And it runs on almost any Windows computer left out there.

In my book, you still can't beat 98SE. Microsoft tried to stop supporting
it...another way to try to get people satisfied with their computers to go
buy XP...which to me is a nightmare if you like to change hardware a lot for
whatever reason, but mass campaigning put the kabosh on that idea. Thank
goodness. So you can still get the security patches when they come out for
it.

Yep. 98 SE.
 
V

Van T. Dinh

BTW, you should know that there are 2 versions of Windows XP, namely "Home"
version and "Professional" version. XP Home is the later version of Windows
ME and XP Professional is the later version of Windows 2000 Professional.

Microsoft support for ME has stopped or will stop shortly so it is better to
use XP.
 
D

dWise

Windows XP Professional SP2, but only on pc's who are capable of
running it (+1.5 Gz, +256 MB)
 
A

Alex White MCDBA MCSE

Depends on what you are doing, if you are running applications and only
applications that are 5-6 years old that were written for ME then maybe
Windows ME, personally the NT products (NT3.51 workstation, NT4 workstation,
Windows 2000 Professional , Windows XP Professional) that MS have produced
are far more reliable than the equivalent 'home user products' e.g. Windows
3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98SE, Windows ME, for at least a couple
of reasons firstly the memory management is totally different and better
with the NT products, and the HAL (hardware abstraction layer). How many
times have you had to reboot your computer running ME because an application
crashed?.

The thing that clouds this argument is perceived performance, NT based
systems feel slower than their equivalent 'home product', this is due to the
more rigorous checking within the NT platform on memory usage, disk usage
etc.

Windows XP Pro SP2 is the best operating system MS have ever produced for
the desktop, but it does require a good spec computer to run it, e.g. my
lappy is 3GHz 2GB RAM, 60GB 7200 rpm HDD and it runs faultlessly.

Also consider whether MS are supporting the product you want, and all the
software driver manufacturers are writing drivers for the OS you want.

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifewin
 
Top