I don't know about that - I find XP at least as stable as Win2K was.
The key is "was", but Win2k has also further matured and
become more stable. Basically, XP is less stable because XP
has more addt'l things tacked onto it. Beyond that, they are
very much the same OS.
Which makes it less mature, the newer things added are prone
to have more bugs remaining.
and has better control when things go wrong.
"Control" of what? In typical uses it doesn't matter, what
really matters is if the user/environment needs the things
XP adds or not.
It has more support and
pretty much every driver going.
Support? For what?
Most 3rd party XP drivers work on 2k.
You shouldn't want any of the drivers that come with XP
installed at all. XP is worse for having drivers included
because in many cases you don't want to have to do a lot of
extra things to prevent XP from protecting it's original
files trying to get the newer better, fuller featured driver
installed. It's just cleaner too to never have old
references to nor remnants of drivers instead of having the
OS wait for the specific driver you choose. It only takes
10 minutes or less to install all drivers for a system that
may run for years.
Win 2K won't play all games, but if you are
happy with what you have, then leave it alone!!!
I've heard that a lot but there aren't many games 2K won't
play. Gamers are funny though, some will do a special
config of 2K specifically for gaming, or of server 2K3 with
re-enabled features MS had disabled, or a tiny XP install.
It's really not very important, I agree if a system is
running an OS that does what needs done there is no
compelling reason to change, even reason not to since the XP
license adds about $120 onto the cost.
If you are finding things are running badly (I presume this by the memory
upgrade), then perhaps your swapfile is fragmented. Set the virtual memory
size to min = 0 and max = 0, then reboot. Defragment your hard drive, then
set the virtual memory size to min = 2gb, max = 2gb. That would give you 4gb
total memory, which is plenty for just about anyone in Win2k. By setting the
min and max to the same size, Windows will create the virtual memory file
(page file) in 1 contiguous block and it will never change size, so will not
get fragmented and slow down.
It's not likely to be a virtual memory problem because if
there were a significant amount of virtual memory in use the
system would've ground to a halt with 1GB of memory versus
2GB, and wouldn't have a 1.4GB system cache as pictured.
When the cache is that large the primary access to virtual
memory is just allocation of memory segments never used - a
tiny write that isn't impacted much at all by pagefile
fragmentation.
While setting pagefile minimum to a fixed size is useful,
setting the max value such that it never grows larger is not
of much usefullness because if the system were ever to need
more it has a problem, while if it doesn't need more then
there would be no fragmentation without the fixed max value.
