Welcome! I agree with your train of thought, though with Win2k things will feel snappier. And you'll get a bit more retro street cred. 😉 I bet others will have other input. You can always switch XP to Classic Theme so it looks like Win2k.

Cheers!

i usually favor 2000 over xp unless the rig is pentium4/athlonxp or newer.

I'd say Win2K would be right at home on a system like that.

I'd go for Windows 2000 as well, back in 2006, I bought a Pentium 3 1Ghz for cheap (really cheap) and used it as a secondary machine at home. Really slow until downgraded from XP to Win2k and the stability was the same 😀

I installed win 2K on my friends dual Pentium Pro, that worked very well indeed.

Well my humble opinion is that Windows 7 is out of question if it isn't your main pc.
If you have plans to have some applications that run only on XP go with XP, else go with win 2k, because of all those reasons that was mentioned before.
I like the retro feel of Win2K and it is stable,i'm sure that will work like a charm on your hardware.

Win2k for speed
XP for app compatibility or personal preference but be warned SP3 makes things a bit slower.

I'd actually go for XP. I use XP SP3 on my PIII system, a single CPU Tualatin-1575 with 2GB and it's plenty snappy. I use the Windows Classic theme, though there was absolutely no difference in performance between Classic and Fisher Price.

The various 3DMarks and synthetic benchmarks scored roughly the same on both OSs.

How about dual boot between 98se and 2k?

BeOS.

Thanks for all the responses. After taking into consideration all of the detailed opinions I can finally decide BeOS is the way to go. Hopefully some more of my parts arrive next week and I'll update yas on my progress. 😉

You'll probably need the patched beOS v5 boot floppy and kernel for computers with over 512MB of ram, and the leaked OpenGL drivers that support the Voodoo 3 and 4 cards if you want to play Quake 2 and 3 in hardware-accelerated OpenGL instead of software mode, I assume it can work with the Voodoo 5, but I never tried when I had one...
http://pulkomandy.tk/~beosarchive/index.pl?search=512mb
http://pulkomandy.tk/~beosarchive/index.pl?se … rch=beos-opengl

😦

The Voodoo5 works like a Voodoo4 in BeOS though, the SLI mode isn't supported, some benchmarks:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010606223529/ht … .com/story/3760
It would be a good idea to dual boot BeOS and Windows 2000 or XP, if only for having a better web browser, as the choices for BeOS are really antiquated...

Sorry lolo799 I was only being sarcastic about beos. Thanks though :)

Haha, you got me!
A shame though, it's great...

I used XP and Windows Server 2003, back when I was still using my dual 1GHz P3 system back in late 2005. Worked fine, can't remember how much RAM I had though - I used a GX chipset, so could have supported 2GB.

2000 is ok, and doesn't need activating, but XP is more functional.

Ok over 600mhz with 128mb of ram XP is faster than 2000 unless you install SP3. Then XP runs like molasses in Siberia even on an Athlon 64.

This seems like a very strange combination. If you want to run 2000, XP, or 7, why limit yourself to a Slot 1 build? Anything that can take advantage of the dual CPUs will probably run much better on faster hardware anyway. I suppose faster hardware might not have the AGP support for the Voodoo 5, but isn't 3dfx support in NT-based systems already kind of limited?

I should give up trying to figure these things out.