Pros/cons of migrating to W2K Pro client -vs- XP client in a school, or any biz??

plucky duck · January 8th, 2002, 01:09 AM

I guess not for a school, but any businesses out there. If you were an admin and about to migrate out of NT domain with 98 clients, which client OS would you choose (W2K Pro or XP Pro) and why?? Are the pros of one over another substantiative enough that it is worth the weight of tagging along the cons as well?

The way I see it, most people who work for a business probably already has a 98 or 2000 machine running at home. XP is user friendly? Not really, imo, if you've dealt with 2000 at home. With XP, I'm assuming you'll be getting more techical support calls than if you went with 2000. 2000 has been in the market for quite some time now, help is out there and plenty resourceful, bugs still exist but has become a pretty stable OS. XP still needs some work.

So, what are your thoughts on this? Really interested in the thoughts of network/system admins out there too

Plucky

e980238 · January 8th, 2002, 08:49 PM

win2k will be good if you would only need it for internet access and office appz. I go to DeVry and they are using NT4 along with win2k. I have yet to see an XP box. XP has more drivers and some eye candy but is newer and more expensive. Personally i would go with win2k for the $$$. But if you want better driver support than go with XP.

FreakyOCR · January 8th, 2002, 09:01 PM

I use Win2k Pro for Graphics, Office Apzz, Web Design, Video Editing etc.

It is pretty slow for gaming though and legacy dos based games may not work if they want to communicate directly with the Hardware Abstraction layer....

DVNT1 · January 8th, 2002, 10:46 PM

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.

Xaotic · January 8th, 2002, 10:50 PM

W2K would currently be(and is with respect to win OS) my system of choice. It has a much longer time in service and tends to run with exceptional stability for a Windows OS. The service packs and hotfixes are widely available. Issues and workarounds are easier to research and implement. XP still needs to mature and tends to be a very slow OS on older machines. I've seen one boot in 17 min on a 266 with 64meg of ram. Since this is for a business, M$ has a corporate program where you buy liscenses for XP Pro and can recieve the media for W2K and access the XP upgrades when you wish to upgrade. This would be a good method of selling it to the boss. Management has to pay for the OS, but not upgrade the hardware immediately and can later upgrade the OS for free after hardware and OS issues have been resolved.

e980238 · January 8th, 2002, 11:07 PM

Quote:

I've seen one boot in 17 min on a 266 with 64meg of ram

thats because the minimum requirements are a 300MHZ processor and 128MB of RAM. Even with that it will run like shyt. i would recomend at least 500MHz and 192MB RAM

Xaotic · January 8th, 2002, 11:40 PM

At that point it was Whistler Beta 1 and is actually supported though not recommeded.

Here's What You Need to Use Windows XP Professional
PC with 300 megahertz or higher processor clock speed recommended; 233 MHz minimum required (single or dual processor system);* Intel Pentium/Celeron family, or AMD K6/Athlon/Duron family, or compatible processor recommended
128 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher recommended (64 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features)

The part about may limit performance is more than true. I agree, it needs much more and isn't really happy till you get to a 1Ghz with at least 512Meg, but it still wants more.