Win98 or Win 2000

Im still using win98sE. Wanted to know the advantages of upgrading to win 2000. Is it better? safer? More secure? Would I benefit with the upgrade?

 

Well, it all depends on what you're doing with it and your systems specs, I run Windows 2000 Pro on my main system and have tested it on my test systems/etc, the main advantage of Windows 2000 is that 1) It's a NT kernel, so its much, much, much more stable than Windows 98 will EVER be - and - 2) It's much more secure than Windows 98 will ever be. - Personally I restart mymain PC (Running Win2k) about once every 3-5 weeks or so, or when I install software that requires it, the specs of my system as of right now are: Celeron D 2.66Ghz/256MB RAM/60GB HDD, Win2k runs lightening fast on this system, but you can get by with much lesser specs, I can run Win2k Pro on a 200Mhz Pentium Pro/96MB RAM/6GB HDD and it runs just fine, very stable, and quick (Actually runs better than 98SE does.) you would definately benefit from the upgrade, but Windows Longhorn is releasing I believe sometime in 2006, so you may benefit more upgrading to XP home edition (If your system can handle it.), I personally think Win2k Pro is the best Windows OS out, it takes a little longer to learn than 98SE, and its quite harder to fix than it is to fix 98SE, however, I've found that the amount of times I have to fix Win2k versus the amount I have to fix 98SE in a year, is quite a difference (1:20), what I'd recommend as minimum specs to happily run Win2k would be: 500Mhz CPU, 192MB RAM, 8GB HDD, and 2000 will run quickly, and efficiently, and stil run anything you want to run on 98SE (However, due to the lack of DOS on Windows 2000 Pro, some DOS games won't run properly under it.) I can't think of any reason not to upgrade, however, if your PC is fast enough, I'd go with XP home.

 

Win2K is more stable and far less likely to be brought down by an errant application than Win9x/ME (though if all your programs are "model citizens" this may be less of a concern). It does not have the User/GDI resource limitations either allowing you to run more applications simultaneously and it can handle memory far better.

I would agree with Comp01 that it offers better security but this does largely depend on you using a limited user/power user account for day-to-day use rather than the Administrator. However there are an increasing number of security programs (Process Guard, RegDefend, Ewido) that only run on Win2K/XP systems.

It is more complex to manage, in part due to the ability to create multiple user accounts and being able to set different permissions (security policies and file access rights) for each one. It also misses some of the bells and whistles of Windows 98 - specifically the desktop themes, though these can easily be added on (just copy the contents of the Program Files\Plus! folder onto the Win2K system and run themes.exe - you will also need to copy the fonts across since Win2K lacks many of them and you may need to convert the wallpaper files from .jpg to .bmp, updating the .theme files accordingly).

Some older applications may have problems running in Windows 2000 (especially games which expect direct access to the hardware) - VDMSound can help here with soundcard and VESA graphics emulation while DOSBox can be used for the really awkward cases, but at a significant performance penalty.

 

Beefcarver,

I'd recommend you go for Win2k or WinXP because of the following reasons:

1)2k/XP is much more stable and secure
2)Certain hardware will only fully expose their capabilities under Win2k/XP
3)Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) is no longer available for Windows 9x drivers
4)Windows 9x has been officially obsoleted
5)Windows 2000/XP will provide much better memory management for your computer

Hope this helped.

Best Regards,
Firecat