There is very little difference under the covers: as others have said, turning off unnecessary services and driver loading results in a very slight performance improvement in the XP/2003 series versus the 2000 series. That said, our decision was to completly bypass the XP/2003 - actually start a very expedited migration off of $soft servers and clients - to Linux on both our servers (a no brainer) and also our clients (somewhat controversial by in the end justified by metrics and thus a success.) If your platform etc allows you should take a hard look at open source solutions. If not then the xp/2003 stuff works well with adequate resource utilization when properly configured.
Another neat feature about XP is the higher level of security over personal folders and/or files. You cannot open or see them even when you're using another Microsoft OS in a different partition, while you can under Win2000.
From a trader's workstation viewpoint there is no difference, except a slightly faster reboot time. If u need drivers/extra security/swapping user privileges/antivirus then you're probably using it for multimedia -- if in that case, then xp *home*... the "Professional"version isn't more stable (although it sounds like it should) -- its just the same thing they did with windows 3.1 into 3.11 for workgroups.
are you sure ? before I switched over to Linux on my laptops we were using secure wireless - just not this latest version..... even the earlier versions properly secured can require the hacker 24 - 48 hours on a fairly large box(s) to break the encryption code (keep in mind I said properly secured even in light of the encryption breaks that have been published). We just rotated the security - and still do.
The Black viper clone sight was helpful in providing a list of services to be turned off...But can one set ALL the services to manual and let the software decide which ones it wants?...otherwise turning off one service at a time is very laborious... Michael B.
Windows 2000 will support WEP, but any script kiddy can easily hack it (it can even be hacked passively, making it imposable to detect a hacking attempt). WAP isnât perfect, but it is far more secure then WEP and requires an active attack to break the encryption which can be detected long before the network is compromised. Do a quick search for wireless hacking and you will find plenty of free utilities that will break WEP. Basically, WEP will keep a honest man honest, but not much more.
Logically it seems like that would work. However, there is text which states "... sometimes Windows won't turn on a service as needed when set to manual..." Suggest you go through the hassle of evaluating which services you can go without then make a copy for future reference. (There is even some freeware which will let you save your services file as a ".exe" file for future restoration... but I haven't tried the software.)
Do yourself a favor by having 2 gigabytes of RAM when you run Windows XP Professional. The real memory footprint of XP Professional is about 600MB -- i.e., the amount of memory it takes to completely load the OS into memory. 2GB is necessary if you want peak peroformance from XP & your trading software.
Actually when I say properly configured I dont mean a single wep key - there is a simple network topology that defeats that avenue of attack even using wep - use it and even breaking the wep key does not gain entry to actual resources or networks. So, wep or wpa .. it makes no difference.