Reply 40 of 71, by feipoa
- Rank
- l33t++
Back in the mid-late 90's, I personally used Windows 95, then jumped to NT4, then to W2K, then to XP Pro. When I bought my dual PII-400, it came with NT4, which was particular to get setup, but ran very fast. It lacked USB support though, so within a month of W2K coming out, I bought it and installed it. I didn't care for the reduced GUI speed, so went back to NT4 for another few years. I eventually upgraded to W2K around 2004 when support for NT4 was really lacking. I kept going on W2K until 2010 or so, when support ceased. I upgraded to dual PIII-850 on the same motherboard and reluctantly upgraded to XP Pro. Boy was the slow-down ever noticeable. Far worse than the slow-down from NT4 to W2K. Now a dual PIII-850 is not that far off from your target system of 1000 MHz, so, based on my experience, I would have chosen W2K. W2K was one of MS's forgotten OS's because of how short of a glory life it had until XP came out. I used W2K until the bitter end and found it more reliable than NT4 or XP Pro.I have ultimately used each OS for about the same number of years.
The user pointed out that he was having issues with a VIA board and specific expansion cards. Isn't this a common issue among VIA chipsets? I personally don't like using VIA unless it is the 266T or the MVP3 with only 3DFX in the AGP slot. I had a dual CuMine Apolo Pro 133 with 1.1 GHz CPUs. I ran it for years along side my dual PIII-850. Both systems ran the same software, but boy oh boy was the my dual Apollo Pro system a lot less stable in comparison.
It was already mentioned that XP Pro can be slimmed down, so I won't bother commenting further. However, I still prefer W2K. Isn't W2K the last supported OS for 3dfx?
One other possibility that you might want to consider to put this debate to rest - how abut a quad boot system? Spacious hard drives are cheap these days. Nobody is paying $400 for a 2 gig drive anymore. On my boxed systems (K6-III, PIII, Tualaton, VIA Nehemiah, etc, etc...), I set them up with Win98SE, WinNT4, W2K, and XP Pro. On sometimes substitute W2K for Win2003 on non-AGP dual Tualatin build. You can readup on the particularities on setting up a quad boot environment with just the Windows boot loader here, The Ultimate Multi-Boot Windows Benching Machine
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.