Laptop with Win98 or Win2000 - which is better?

[aircasper]

At Rossman's wonderful suggestion, I thought I'd post this question. I'm deciding between an IBM X20 with cel500 and Win98 and the same computer with Win2000. I've generally heard that Win2000 is a much more stable OS. I don't imagine that I'll be using the computer for much other than the MS Office 2000 programs. However, I'm a bit worried about compatibility issues, particularly with drivers. Is it particularly difficult finding compatible Win2000 drivers for things like a Linksys NIC PC Card, printer, USB drives, etc? Any other things that I should think about in deciding between Win98 and Win2000 (speed, performance, etc.) would also be appreciated. Thanks!

You can read this Thread to get additional info on the laptop that I'm considering.

 

[jeremy806]

I bought a laptop with WinME recently.

Thing to think about is: how much memory do you plan on buying.

My Celeron 550 laptop came with only 64M of memory, I would not bother running w2k without at least 128M, referably 192M or 256M.

Also, I like 9x/Me because of the simplicity. On my laptop, I surf the web and type stuff in WordPerfect, I just don't need w2k on that thing.

jeremy806

 

[aircasper]

good point. i don't imagine doing much more on this cel500 other than primarily word processing, spreadsheets, and web surfing. i'll probably be upgrading the laptop to 192mb of ram.

 

[John]

<< I've generally heard that Win2000 is a much more stable OS. I don't imagine that I'll be using the computer for much other than the MS Office 2000 programs. However, I'm a bit worried about compatibility issues, particularly with drivers. Is it particularly difficult finding compatible Win2000 drivers for things like a Linksys NIC PC Card, printer, USB drives, etc. >>



Win 2K is extremely stable. The OS has a huge &quot;native&quot; driver database, and the hardware mfg's have basically relaeased drivers for their hardware to support Win 2K. You can always look the drivers up before hand.

 

[nakedfrog]

last time i reformatted, i installed WinME. i really had no idea who made my network card, so it took me quite a while to find the appropriate drivers. when i recently switched to win2k, it recognized the card and loaded the drivers automatically.
runs a bit faster on my old p2 350 as well.
my .02