NT vs. 2000

Be patient, I'm a novice and need a little advice.

I have a laptop with NT but need to use it with a digital camera that requires 2000. For some reason, I have it in my head that NT and 2000 are the same????

If not, and I need to upgrade, how do I do that? I know I get the software, but then what? Do I just delete the old operating system first, then install the new? Just put the new cd in and go from there? will I loose all other programs, etc?

Thanx for your input.

depends on what ya wanna do......if u still want to keep nt boot it up and slap in the win2k cd.do a fresh install.now when ya boot up u will have the choice of two os.if u want to blow out nt choose upgrade.

NT4 and W2000 share similar architectures and some code, but W2000 is vastly improved over NT in almost all areas. Kind of like W95 vs W98, W98 is much better.

nt4 uses very little space and system resources, is very stable but not home user friendly, the plug and play hardware detection of 2k makes it worth the upgrade, if you have the machine to run it. nt4 is very limited in what it can actually do in todays world, even after the updates to service pack 6, it is not a good home user operating system, most software and hardware does not support it. if you want to set up a web site or a small server system, nt4 rocks, but not much good at all for anything else.

Well, to tell you the truth, W2000 seems to crash a lot less than NT 4.0 (at least for me), but on the other hand, it also uses up a lot more resources (RAM, Hard disk space, CPU etc.) Here are some pros/cons to consider:

1. NT 4.0 needs less RAM and less powerful CPU than W2000 to run. Your RAM needs may vary depending on what you usually use your laptop for. Personally, I wouldn't run W2000 on anything less than 128 MB of RAM and 400 MHz Pentium CPU. If you want to use W2000 and have less RAM than this, consider buying some more, or be prepared to run with a lot of file swapping.

2. W2000 is more stable than NT 4.0 (again, my experience only)

3. If I recall correctly, Microsoft has (or is planning to) stopped support of NT 4.0 and will stop releasing patches soon. See http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/se...,2129417,00.htm for more. So, if there's some new security hole in NT 4.0, you may be out of luck getting a patch.