Does anyone know if you can UPGRADE XP to 2000, or is that going backwards? I have 2000 on my Dell, and love the OS - never a problem. My new machine has XP. I know I could obviously load 2000, but I am more interested in upgrading so I don't have to mess with putting on drivers, et cetera that would remain intact if I could just upgrade. Thanks in advance.
What you are describing is a downgrade, not an upgrade. XP is an update to 2000. No, you cannot do it without a full re-install.
Thanks - you answered my question. I have heard that 2000 is more stable than XP. From the replies on this thread, I take it this is not true? Thanks again.
You cannot "downgrade" an OS. You can reformat and start from scratch though. XP is as stable as Windows 2000 in most cases, unless you have older hardware, or some older apps that run under XP. XP Pro is better than XP Home though.
Thats not exactly true. If you have the same services running, XP should be just as stable and maybe slightly faster, though probably not noticible. The key there is "same services running". By default, XP has a lot of stuff running that is not really needed by many people or are only used for the cute user friendly stuff. For some, it can cause problems. However, you can turn all that crap off. For example, you probably don't need the drive indexed. That slows things down some. If you are not using a wireless LAN, you can disable the services that are related to that. There are a few more things like that. I just gave a few examples.
Then I wouldn't fix what ain't broke. Sure, there will be a one-time hassle of reformatting the drive on the new computer, installing W2K, and updating necessary drivers. But when you're done you have an O/S that's exactly like the one you're used to, where everything is found in the same place, everything operates the same way. If you mess around with XP on your new computer you'll see that in it's infinite wisdom Microsoft has relocated a number of utilities, services, configurations, etc. aside from changing the look of many things. In fact some options they've buried so deep (presumably to protect the innocent) that they're downright tricky to find. I have a dual-boot setup with XP and W2K and 99% of the time I run W2K as I prefer it's simplicity, it's lack of graphical cutesyness (which I've mostly turned off in XP when I could find where to turn it off), it's close similarity to NT (which I ran for 4 years), and it's proven absolute rock-solidness. The only time I boot into XP is when, in order to force migration, Microsoft creates a program like MovieMaker which only runs in XP. Other than that, I see no reason at this time to stop using a most worthy performer. And btw, W2K is 3½ years old at this time (introduced Dec 99), not 4. But as long as it does everything I want, and does it well, I don't care if it's 10 years old.
Someone PM'd me and told me to go the dual boot route. Does this take up many resources? In other words, does having two OS's in any way take away from performance, memory, storage, etc? If not, this is probably the route I will go. And - thanks to everyone that responded and all responses! Good information, and I hope you all have a great Sunday!
The only problem you face is with newer hardware. Eventually, hardware will not support W2K. I ran into some low end Dells that came with XP Home. Tried to install W2K, but no driver support for the Nic Card. Try to find support for new hardware and NT, and you can see the future of W2K.
How do you know what you can turn off and how do you turn it off? XP definitely runs slower on one machine I have that doesn't have a whole lot of RAM, but it certainly handles multimonitors better than 2000.