Actually my plan was to switch to Solaris or Linux when building or buying my next system, but there is this amazing software which only runs on Windows. Could be a reason to stay with Windows. Its even multi-threaded so it could be worth to switch from Windows 2000 to an OS which supports hyper-threading. Hence my question. From your feedback I think XP Pro will be the better choice for me though.
Well, actually no. Unix admins are now cheap: as cheap as Windows admins. Talent can be now had for reasonable rates making it quite easy to find people that can quickly learn the details of Linux/mySQL/PHp etc On the high end it is still a question mark - except for the most demanding TPA's: By the way, you left out the OS licensing for sql server and oracle which on multiprocessor machines with many simultaneous users is very expensive. Small business server is IMHO not a good value. The requirements to have all the server applications on just a single box make it more expensive than it seems: First you need a bigger more expensive box to run all the server processes and your backup and configuration requirements are IMHO a nightmare. The single box windows server configurations are soo brittle that even the smallest change or customization can cause the entire system to fail. We've seen this again and again with MS products having incompatibilities between their server products.
I use WinServer2003. This is the best OS ever MS has released. Subscribing MSDN, and got the other softwares such as Visual Studio.net 2003, installing multiple PCs, the cost performance is not bad at all. Basically, all of the server function is turned off as the default setting, and this OS can be used as an excellent workstation. I run eSignal, IB-TWS, and my auto-execution system written in C#. If you google WindowsServer2003, desktop, workstation, whatever, you will find many very positive comments by IT professionals for using this OS as a desktop OS . WinServer2003 is a 'light' OS than XP and RedHat9. How to convert your Windows Server 2003... to a Workstation! http://www.msfn.org/win2k3/index.htm