Windows 2000 or ME?

[jaredm77]

Ok, I am building the following system:

AMD Athlon 1.2GHZ CPU
Asus A7V133 Motherboard
Crucial 512MB PC133 CL2 RAM
ATI Radeon 64MB DDR Video Card
IBM 75GXP 45GB UDMA100 7200RPM Hard Drive
Pioneer DVD-116 16X/40X DVD-ROM
Plextor Plexwriter 16/10/40A CD-RW
Sound Blaster Live X-Gamer 5.1
US Robotics 56K V.90 Modem
Microsoft Internet Keyboard Pro
Microsoft Intellimouse Optical
Viewsonic GS790 19" Monitor
Linksys LNE100TX NIC

Ok, enough specs, now i need to decided whether or not to use Windows 2000 or Windows ME. Which one will work better on this system? Faster? Easier? That kind of thing. Mostly gaming and office applications will be used, but I want to get the right operating system without having to dual boot. Thanks.

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

jaredm77,

WinME is the worst display of OS code written since OS2! You'd be better off with Win98 or W2K. You may have to bang your head against a wall to find W2K drivers for all that hardware but you'll do better than using crappy WinME!

ST4R,

 

[igiveup]

What is your goal for the OS? Stable? Windows 2000 Pro. Games? Windows 98 SE. Its really hard for me to recommend win ME. There is a lot of overhead with ME that you just don't have with 98. The TCP/IP stack is slower than 98's. I mention this because I assume you want to go multiplayer online. It matters if you want to be an LPB. On the other hand setting up a network in win ME was stupid simple. I plugged a laptop into the network in my company that had win ME on it (Don't look at me, I didn't make the choice) and the thing instantly recognized all the shared drives and printers (after I had setup the TCP/IP on it though). To top it off it was new and had all the drivers for each. Let me tell you, that was nice.

Problems with that laptop made me take out the battery to get it to reboot (it hardlocked and everytime I hit power it would put it into suspend mode and when I pressed again it would just pop back into the same hardlocked screen. Pissed me off). That little problem has no bearing on your situation if you are building a comp though. One other thing that you should know about ME is that it has a Auto Recovery feature that takes snapshots of your computer and lets you easily recover to any day within (I think it was a months time). The downside there is that it eats up system resources which is understandable with what it is being asked to do. Just FYI.

I have Windows 2000 Pro on my computer here at home. When it works it is really great. When it doesn't (very rarely) it was hard for me to figure out what was going wrong because it really isn't like win 98. Its more like NT in the way it does things and is layed out, which makes sense. Don't worry though, if you have any problems, forums like this are here. My suggestion is to go for stability. You only lose a little performance compared to win 98 and I don't think any compared with win ME.

Good Luck!!!

 

[igiveup]

When you are done building your system can I have it? I wish I could build that now, but I don't have the cash yet. LOL, I am going to wait for that wonderfully promising TYAN 760MP board and go with dual palomino's. COME ON NV20!

 

[IamDavid]

Win2K is the best.. ME is garbage.

 

[igiveup]

Oh, you can also close down ports in win 2k Pro, unlike win ME. Nice feature to back up a firewall product like Black Ice.

 

[jaredm77]

Alright, it looks like I'll be going with Windows 2000, thanks for the help guys.

 

[bigd480]

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