Win2k viable alternative to Win98?

[Operandi]

Here are the system specs

Athlon 1.2 GHz
256 MB PC133
MSI K7T-Turbo2
ATi Radeon VIVO
AOpen 24x burner
Integrated Sound (for the time being)

I?m going to be helping a friend of mine build this system and I?m not sure what OS is the best choice. We want the stability of NT but also have good game/hardware compatibility. The machine is going to be seeing a little bit of everything including quite a bit of gaming, UT specifically. I?ve never used Win2K in a gaming environment so this is the part has me a bit worried. So is Win2K a good choice for this system also what updates should be installed to get everything up-to-date?

 

[Insidious]

Ok, I'm not the best authority, so take this with a grain of salt plz....

I think you might want to consider XP.

Win2K is a great OS, but it seems to need quite a bit of TLC to get/keep it goin'. WindowsXP is basically NT version 5 so you get the stability, but there is also an element of performance you would expect from Win2K rolled into XP. I found that I didn't have to be an IT guru to get XP installed and runnin' like a champ. My games, hardware and applications work (I didn't have to throw anything away when I upgraded from 98).

the appearance is a little.... 'trite' and there are plenty of automated functions that I turned off, but I was able to do this with the menus and didn't have to look for system files to tweak or registry entries to remove....

it was easy, it is stable and might be worth a look to you?

 

[Operandi]

Insidious:

Yeah, I?m running XP right now on practically the same system so I know it will work great. However my friend doesn?t have access to XP so it really isn?t an option at this point. Right now its either Win98 or Win2K.

 

[Rand]

Go with Win2k. It's got the obvious stability benefits, and the vast majority of games work perfectly fine. You may encounter the occasional older game that won't work, but the vast majority you shouldnt have any issues with and anything recent should run fine.

 

[Frosty20]

Ditto. I have 98, 2k, and XP Pro and 2k and XP are much more stable and work with most new apps. Make sure you install SP2 because it adds compatability (95, 98, NT emulation) mode

 

[Richard98]

<< So is Win2K a good choice for this system also what updates should be installed to get everything up-to-date? >>



I upgraded from win98 to win2k a couple of weeks ago, and as others have pointed out the stability is incredible. I had constant lock ups with win98 but no lock-ups at all in win2k. Only reason I went with 2k over xp is better compatiblity with my peripherals - didn't want to spend $200 - $300 replacing a perfectly good scanner and mp3 player.

As far as updates, you can just use the "Windows Update" icon that w2k installs, connect to the Microsoft site and it'll let you know what you should download. I would skip service pak 1 and just download service pak 2. I don't know about the ATI Radeon, but with the ATI All In Wonder the w2k drivers were also at the windows update site.