View Single Post
Old January 8th, 2002, 10:46 PM     #4 (permalink)
DVNT1
addicted
 
DVNT1's Avatar
 
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: Ohio
Posts: 6,103
Well I'm in that exact situation. Most workstations I have are Win95 (with some NT4.0 and Unix for CAD). I recently spent ~$18,000 in XP licenses for all machines. W2K and XP licensing were the same price. I will actually install W2K though.

Some reasons:

* program compatability is known/tested in more cases with W2K than XP. From the business stand point this is very important because some program vendors will not support a configuration with XP clients. Others vendors have relatively limited support knowledge.
* system stability is still more certain with W2K
* many OS exploits are well known (and patched) with W2K now
* W2K seems to do better with the same resources that are common in my enviroment (per informal testing)


On the other hand some XP only features sound good:

* rewritten/improved kernel (more stability?)
* seemingly better restore/repair methods built in
* built in remote desktop feature seems promising (but potential security problem?)
* ability to use an IRC server to make use of the built in "instant support option" (at least from I've been told)
* better multi-lingual OS support built in


I sent an associate to a WinXP support class in late Dec. (I forget the MS class number). His opinion was that W2K & XP do very similar things as far as our working enviroment goes.


So, no compelling reason to go to XP with so many unknowns and the lack of support for our applications.

Last edited by DVNT1 : January 8th, 2002 at 10:48 PM.
DVNT1 is offline   Reply With Quote