Windows 2000 vs XP, your choice?

[kayleigh]

Vista has almost none of my interest. I may never use that OS .

Talk about bloatware... the installation disk will be supplied on DVD only, and you need 1GB RAM and 15GB free hard drive space JUST TO RUN THE OS??? It makes me long for the days of Windoze 3.1 (8MB RAM & 256MB hard drive... those were the days). :p

[fuzzweed]

i reakon it's all down to machine specs. XP runs fine on my XP3200 machine and does have some good features (RDP, wireless management, network monitoring etc.) that I do miss when I fiddle with my P3 machine running 2000, which inturn has even more features that I miss (network setup, more user friendly GUI, etc) when I use a P2 laptop running 98.
Each machine is fine in it's own right, but chugs badly when I've tried to put on the next newest OS. I guess if I ever (not likely!) tried to run vista on the XP3200 I'd experience the same issue.
The OS's have really just been improved (bloated?) as technology has improved, so I'd just recommend matching the generation of OS to the generation of CPU that it was 'designed' for.
On a side note I also have a soft spot for linux, but I honestly haven't found a good reason to swap. I tried xbuntu on the premise that it might me a slim OS suitable for running on the P2 but it's still nowhere near as quick as 98....

[fuzzweed]

...I also dislike that it has to check in with MS to make sure it's legal....

...although there is one good reason for sticking to 2000

[23skidoo]

Over broadband? For gaming? Home-grown HTPC? All of the above? XP SP2 all the way. No contest.

Just make sure you let it download and install all of its updates manually. Seriously. And put AVG Free (antivirus) and Windows Defender (anti-adware) on there. Stable as a rock.

And I vaguely remember Windows 2000 having consistently flaky hardware support issues. But it's been so long....