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Turning PC into server...which OS? XP or 2000?

T

Trey22

Diamond Member
Current setup: Wife's PC, my work laptop. Wired/wireless network.

I am buying my wife a laptop, and wanted to turn her old PC into a server. PC has a 80GB drive which will be basically just the OS, and I just bought a 200GB for storage purposes.

It will store the usual stuff... docs, mp3's, videos, images of our laptops hard drives. Backup will be to an external hard drive.

I'd like to have remote access to it (VNC?), and the ability to upload/download files (FTP).

PC currently has XP Home on it, but I do have 2000 Professional available. 98 is available, but I know that is out of the question.

Any advantage on using one OS over the other? My lappy runs XP Pro, and wifes new lappy will probably run XP Home, maybe Pro. I do run Ubuntu on an old box at work, but still working my way through learning some Linux.

Thx, Trey.



 
This is a heavy Linux board, so I'm sure you'll get a lot of suggestions for that... but for what is sounds like you want to do (simple file server) then XP will do just fine. If you run into any areas like needing an FTP server, there are plenty of free applets for XP. If this is XP Home, the only reason I might consider win2k for is for terminal services. VNC is fine, but terminal services is (in my experience) much faster and I like it much better.

EDIT - I misread your post as saying you have 2000 Server available. After re-reading and seeing you said Win2k Pro, I would say it's a no-brainer -- stick with XP.
 
I'd recommend Ubuntu with a lite gui (for ease of configuring before you make it headless) or XP Pro.

You can even enable software raid 5 on XP Pro (already built into Ubuntu).



 
I would use Win2k Pro. It's less resource intensive than XP Home and the networking abilities would be easier to setup...IMHO of course.
 
Home has a 5 user concurrent limit on network connections. So that might be a consideration. 2000 Pro would give you 10.
 
I'm using XP Home, but it's because I'm too lazy/cheap to buy a license of XP Pro when Home came with the PC and works 😉. All I'm doing is simple http/ftp and mapped drives-style file sharing. Though I do with I could get user quotas with XPHome. I also use VNC on all my PCs.
 
*bsd is going to be the best...it's got the most free license you can get for your PC 🙂

it also offers MUCH better remote access in the way of ssh.
 
Thanks for all the replies guys... I have wanted to dive more into Linux networking, just haven't had the time to really sit down w/ it.

Would the following work: Dual boot XP/2000 and Linux on my OS drive (80GB), and have both access my shared files on my storage drive (200GB)? That way, if whatever Linux flavor I go with doesn't work out, I have Windows to fall back on.
 
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