We have 2 small businesses. One is running XP (6 user) and the other is a
combination of 2K and 98.
We have 10 users and I want to put them all on either 2K or XP. I am
looking for advise on which to go to.
In order to effectively use Windows XP Professional you are going to
need some basic hardware:
At least a P3 CPU of 800Mhz or faster.
At least 256MB of RAM, 384 or 512 would be best.
If you run Office XP or 2003, get 512MB RAM.
If you can get P4 based systems you are better off, but a P3 800 will
run just fine.
I know that XP Prof will run on less than a P3/800, but it's painfully
slow below that speed. XP uses a lot more CPU for "pretty" things than
does 2000 or 98. You can disable those "pretty" things, but it's still
nice to have CPU and Memory to spare.
As for which way - 2000 is on it's way out, 98 was dead a long time ago,
XP is here for a while and supports almost everything on the market and
things to come in the future.
XP Prof has a limit of 10 concurrent connections, for a small office,
with 10 users, you might want to consider a small server running Small
Business Server or a Linux file server for everyone to store the data in
one common place - this would make backups simple too.
