Win2k Bites Too?

Alright, I already blasted XP Pro for all the ridiculous "nuisance" problems it caused when I upgraded from ME (and, of course, no one needs to blast ME to let people know what a bastard piece of crap it is ), so here's my take on Win2k and XP Home.

First, XP Home. XP Home (SP1) hasn't been prone to nearly as many show-stopping problems as my installation of XP Pro. However, I still have four major issues with it (started as 2 major issues... but kind of went up before I got to the end of this sentence):

1. Lack of legacy hardware support. Basically, it works like this: Microsoft used a crappy, bug-ridden AI for the first 4 major incarnations of the 9x series of systems, then decided to drop them all to increase stability and security. What this meant to me was a system that crashed 3 times in 3 weeks as opposed to 3 times in 3 days (Linux ran for 64 days at a similar load before I rebooted it because one of those damn ". Woohoo. Of course, my CD-Burner didn't work, nor did the DVD player or my mouse. Nice.

2. Lack of support for legacy Win9x and DOS apps. I have a lot of stuff, mostly old games, that I like to play now and then, that's for DOS. Unfortunately, that's just not an option in 90% of the cases when your running XP, so keep an older PC around to keep yourself entertained.

3. It runs slooooow as hell. It can take Media Player upwards of two minutes to load an mp3 sometimes. Opening Explorer can take anywhere from 10 seconds to 3 minutes. This is on an AMD Athlon XP 1200+ running at 1.36 GHz with 512 MB PC2100 RAM. Ummm... ok.

4. Those damn tan popup boxes that say "You're an idiot - this just happened and I think you, the user, are too stupid to know it even though you instigated it." Man, I hate those freakin' things.

Now, onto 2000. Normally, I'd wait until I'd given it a more thorough run, but no. It's given me enough of a headache in the measly hour I've had it that I'm just going to rip it to shreds now.

First, let me say that I installed RH8 from 3 CDs with 6 programming languages, a web server, 2 database servers, an ftp server, 2 window managers, and countless productivity apps in about 10 minutes less time than it took to install just Win2k with no frivolities. The RH system has a 44x CD-ROM, the Win2k system a 52x CD-ROM. On top of that, it's a 5400 RPM disk for RH and a 7200 RPM disk for Win2k. Sad.

Now then, the modem. I have a Creative ModemBlaster V.92 in this system that Win2k can't find. PnP my ***. Linux found it just fine when I had Linux on that system, Windows doesn't even have anything in it's driver database for Creative past a 28.8 modem. Strike one.

Sound card. Can't update the drivers because, while the installer runs just fine on Win98, ME, and XP Home and Pro, it won't run under 2000. Strike 2.

Hard disk. Hard Disk management under Win2k is the most obnoxiously difficult task I've ever seen in my life. Seriously... just give me fdisk and format and go away. I never did figure out how to partition the bigger drive into two letters so I could put FAT32 on it instead of NTFS (NTFS volumes have given me headaches for a loooong time now). No fdisk for me, I suppose. Strike 3.

I pine for the good ol' days of Windows 98. Yea. It crashed every couple of hours, but at least you had DOS to go back to when everything got hosed up...

Man, you've found yourself some problems with Win2000. I've been running it on a corporate network for nearly a year, and I can't get it to crash, even when trying.

Ignore 2000 for home use. It's not good. Just use XP for the better media drivers. Yes, I know you lose DOS functionality (it was a blow to me too), but there are workarounds. If old DOS games have the backing and community interest, the developers often write XP support into it to allow them to run under Command Prompt, which is just a glorified version of command.exe

The "Manage Computer" section is fine for disk management - that's what it's intended for. Try hooking it up to a domain and you'll see how it makes things a lot easier from an administrative point of view.

I don't swear allegance to a particular OS or platform, but you've got to use what's best for the job. If Linux sorts you out, don't knock Microsoft for putting out something that is actually fairly easy to configure and get working. Yes, it's slow, but if you can't be bothered to look behind it and see how it hangs together, then don't use it.

I don't see where you can get that 2k is not any good around the home. I am using Win2k Pro sp4 right now and I love it. It doesn't crash like the 9x os's did nor is it xp (yuk).

The great thing about 2k is that with sp3 I was able to play all my games and work with all of the apps and server programs that I wanted to. I have yet to really find a program that doesnt work..

Now 2k is not linux and it is going to have some bugs. The networking can be a problem at first but once you tinker around with it abit it is fairly easy. But, 2k is probably the best os put out by MS IMO.

Believe me, I'm not knocking Microsoft NTFS file systems and the operating systems built on them. I've had a huge amount of exposure to them, and used 2000 at home for a while before shifting to XP. I'm not going back because I've sorted the computer out such that it doesn't crash due to dodgy installations.

Without knocking any people on these sort of forums, they seem to have far too many problems, and it's always down to the way the OS was installed or other software packages that have screwed it up. It's not Microsoft.

I've just upgraded all our 2000 clients and servers on our company network to SP4, without any problems. It's a great OS, but you might as well use XP at home if it's available to you. Frig your games so that they work in XP.

Yes, it's slow, but if you can't be bothered to look behind it and see how it hangs together, then don't use it.
One of the reasons that I don't use it is simply because it's so damn hard to 'look behind it'. A binary registry just is not as tinker-friendly as ascii config files, and a compiled program has got nothing on a bash script in terms of understanding what's going on. I don't recommend MS platforms to anyone who doesn't have solid vendor support available, because it's just so difficult for normal geeks to give well informed support.

I don't have vendor support, and I don't complain when it goes wrong. I get on and sort it out.

Knock yourself out, but I get tired of trying to break through a closed system to fix my problems. I find that an open system makes it an order of magnitude less frustrating to sort out problems.

But heck, if you must have the latest/greatest graphics card promotion packages, then stick with windows ;-)

I troll because I love ;-)

Listen, I'm not trying to persuade you to use Microsoft products. I'm not preaching. But don't knock things unless you've tried them. If after a number of attempts at resolving Win2000 problems you throw it in and go elsewhere, then fine.

I wouldn't touch Linux on our network, but that's because it can't match the admin functionality that Windows 2000 Server offers.

Now why would I use Windows only to have the latest graphics stuff??

CTB: I think that Winz feels your hate and reacts with some nasty tricks!

Good to see someone else who perhaps sees the light-heartedness in this debate...

just try screaming profanities at your computer. It will scare out the goblins.

Kinda like the Sprite advert? I want one of those things...

Aw, Ctb, not having a good week are you? That's two evil rants within 36 hours, and this is only Monday.

When working at TVA last summer, converting the entire place over to XP, I grew to dislike it. I could see the advantages from an overall administrative point of view (SMS, sysprep). All the things you'd like to do with the OS are obscured more than I'd like.

Win2kPro, on the other hand, has been on my home desktop for three years, and I've had little but good luck with it. Issues being:

1. I accidently set permissions on a drive full of files instead of the share of that drive. Oops. I had a relatively recent backup, so no worries.
2. When my Mandrake router left me, I was staying at the house for another week with another guy, and was going to set up my computer to route to him. Not too difficult, start looking around for how to set up routing in win2k. A very long, frustrating time later, I find that "routing" is something completely different than what I wanted. All you have to do is share a network connection. Thirty seconds, tops.
3. My "multimedia keyboard" from some no-name company has only .vxd drivers, thankfully abandoned in 2k. I didn't really like the thing anyway.

Other than that, it's happy. The only game I couldn't get to run was the first Need For Speed, everything else I threw at it ran with minimal effort. Installation may have taken awhile, but it was pretty touch-free. Tell it I'm in the Eastern Time Zone and I'm not on a domain, and that's about it. Walk away for 40 minutes.

Still, I'd like to graduate to BSD if I can. Skip that whole linux thing. I need another test box to throw it on.

I ran win2k sp4 on my home box for over a year, with very few problems. Until I downloaded a windows messenger upgrade and it crashed the whole box (last time I used that program...) But I don't blame that on 2000, it was messenger. Overall, I think that people who prefer linux to begin with (its growing on me) will find all sorts of problems with windows products just because they want to. Not that there aren't a bunch of annoyances with windows, but its easy, so that even your computer ignorant mom can use it. There are inherently compromises in that approach. Basically though, I'll say "live and let live" as far as OS goes. If you're happy with what you have, good enough

How did you run SP4 for over a year? It was only released a couple of weeks back...

I agree with karsh44 - I love php and mysql, and will happily use linux, but I'm not going to drop the use of Windows or any other Microsoft products because they become a monopoly. Now paying for their software is a different issue, as most of you will agree.