Win 200 or XP Pro

[Chris]

I am considering buying a laptop which has Win XP Home
installed on it. I live in a Win NT/2000 environment, so
XP Home is of little use. I'd rather go to Win 2000 and I
have a Win 2000 Upgrade which I have never used. But
looking at the posts on this newsgroup it looks like I
would need to re-format and clean install. Since I have
an upgrade disc I assume I would also need to have a Win
98 install disc to validate the upgrade. My question is -
is it worth it to go to Win 2000 which for me is stable
and does what I need, or should I just upgrade to Win XP
Pro which does not have anything new which I need and may
have stability problems?

Chris

 

[Fred]

Speaking from bitter experience here, win XP pro will work with an 2k
environment, but not too well. I found that it did not fully integrate into
the Active Directory schema, and that it also did not fully integrate into
the security setups. In addition connections seemed quite slow. After
quite a while of frustration, we did a test reinstall of a workstation -
making sure the software we installed onto the workstation was identical to
that which was installed when the workstation was win xp pro. We found a
considerable speed difference. Keep in mind that this is the *same*
workstation we are talking about - we just removed the xp pro and installed
2k pro.

After this test, we reinstalled all the workstations to 2k pro, and did not
regret it for a second. Our server is a 2k server, by the way.

Good Luck!

Fred.