So as some of you know my lap tops mother board is fried so my lap top is in a corner of the closet collecting dust. I ended up picking up some old pentium 4 1.5 ghz processor with 256 mb of Ram from work they were going to throw out. It is by no means a power house but for what I need (web browsing, email and chatting) its more then enough to get the job done. The ting had windows 2000 on it. I attempted to instal an older version of open SUSE but it wouldnt install. I upgraded to windows xp and the system was running riddiculously slow. Even after I dissabled alot of the useless stuff from XP it was just running a lot slower the it did when I had windows 2000 on it. I decided to check out windows 2000 and ive it a shot. I was suprised when I found out that alot of the programs for xp (drivers etc) worked because they shared the same kernel. The operating system is running so much smoother then XP did as well. I was suprised. Im going to end up leaving 2000 installed on this computer because theres no need to change. I never really used windows 2000 before but I have to say I like 2000 pro better then xp
XP and 2000 don't share the same kernel; in fact, their different kernels is specifically why it was such a pain in the ass for software manufacturers to make their products compatible with XP. XP's kernel is written to the same specs as 2000's kernel, but it's a complete rewrite and it's actually more efficient too. On machines with no obvious limitations in their builds, I generally see XP ready-to-use sooner after bootup than 2000. The problem with that old board is the crappy 256MB of RAM on it. XP has gained some weight since its release, but even with a totally un-updated initial release of XP, you need 512MB of RAM to run it properly. What I'd do is put XP on that bitch and plug in 2GB of the fastest RAM the board can handle, which shouldn't cost much anymore.
thanks for correcting me, so it was written off of the same kernel is that what it is? Because from what I read it was both written off of the windows nt kernel or something to that extent. Im not even going to bother buying ram. Right now the system is running pretty fast for what it is. Like I said all I need it for is web browsing and chatting nothing to serious. I'm just suprised at how efficient it is vs XP on this system.
Like I said, the 200 and XP kernels were built based on the same design specifications. But, because the XP kernel was a complete rewrite, the code that achieves those specifications is not necessarily the same -- and in addition to being more efficient in some places, it also inevitably has different quirks that make it not a perfect replacement for the 2000 kernel. That's why there's a Windows 2000 compatibility mode. 2000 definitely has a smaller footprint than XP, but that's mostly due to the fewer and simpler background services running on it, not because of the kernel. You could achieve the same thing in XP by shutting off most of the extra features it has vs. 2000, but you could at least re-enable them if you decided you wanted them later. Can't do that with 2000, because those extra services aren't there in the first place.
If all you wanna do on that is browse the interbutts, and email, and chat, then 2000 is PERFECT for that machine. 2000 is one hell of an OS though. It's up there with one of my favorite OS's.
yeah its workin great freids going to give me some ram tomrrow so I will be up to 512 soon. I might switch over then.