I moved to XP and am happy with it. I increased my RAM to 256 megs and now my machine seems to run much faster. Have not had problems.
activetrader upgrading the ram would help to make your machine run faster - did you upgrade the ram at exactly the same time as you moved to XP - so in other words - did the machine seem to get quicker just moving to XP - or are you none the wiser as you upgraded the ram at the same time - what operating system were you using before?
I am using XP, only 2 monitors, and only 3 chart windows, with about 20 charts, trading platform, watch and listen to Bloomberg over the net, have 4-6 browsers open and a couple misc programs; I have 640 mb of ram and that is more than I need. I have a peice of software from the MB maker (ASUS) that measures the the ram usage and I have never been above 60%. After adding the ram the system did not seem to run faster, started with 256 and then moved to 640. The only thing I noticed when adding the ram - the OS used much more of it! I had a few problems with 2000 and have not had them with XP. I dislike MS in general but am happy with XP.
Are there any issues with adding additional video cards and multimonitors with XP? I recall reading somewhere when it came out that too many plug and play changes would trigger a shut down. I hav a few problems with 2000. Occasionally, I get a notification that I am low on virtual mem. It is very reluctant to shut down. I have had terrible problems with a couple of programs like QCharts and NexTrend although RT runs fine. I never chased down the QCharts/NexTrend issue, as I run it on another system but it setup the application then when I tried to run it, just refused to display anything but indicated the program was running. So im my experience, 2000 is no panacea.
I have 2 cards both Nvidia, 1 tnt, 1 Geforce, and have no problems. It seems to me the problems were due to drivers not being updated. Sounds like you may be refering to the activation issue - by making the system think it is a new system, it requires reactivation. I run Qcharts 4.1, with no problems; however the new beta 4.2, I have had a couple of program errors and shutdown, but none today. I run 3 windows of Qcharts, 2 of 4.1 and 1 of 4.2.