What a bunch of clueless, Microsoft toadying answers.
Windows XP has turned out to be high maintenance
crap compared to Windows 2000 and 98SE. In any
environment with a mix of different OS's, you'll find that
the XP machines, especially ones more than one or two
years old, are the ones that suck up the bulk of any
maintenance or troubleshooting time. As a matter of fact,
the slowest PC's I've ever worked on have been 1st and
2nd generation XP machines with something like 1.5 Ghz
P4's and 256 Mb of memory. Adding more memory helps
a bit, but that little "Windows Rot" issue that affects all
versions of Windows seems to really affect XP far more
than the other versions.
With that said, there are a couple of gotchas when
retrofitting earlier Windows versions, which I've done
quite a bit for people fed up with XP or just wanting a
nice, fast, secure PC:
1) Chances are Windows 2000 won't recognize the
video, network, sound card, and USB chipset in the
PC, so you should identify the drivers and get these
downloaded and stored someplace handy. Dell MIGHT
have some Windows 2000 drivers on their site, but
chances are they won't. Dell, though, tends to use
Intel for their motherboard supplier and Intel has been
generally good at providing drivers for all versions of
OS.
So find out what chipsets are being used and see
if you get get the Win2k drivers for them. If you can't
do this, then you probably go no further.
2) You probably have enough space on your hard
to keep WinXp and add 2k in a second partition for
dual booting. You'll need to buy a utility for this like
Acronis Partition Expert. A description for using it
is here:
http://www.theeldergeek.com/hard_drives_05.htm
You will find two partitions on the Inspiron: the drive
C: partion and the hidden one that's used for recovery.
I've found that system recovery causes a lot more
grief than not to people not really understanding what
that really does to their PC. Still, you can just leave
it alone if you want and just resize down the the
existing XP partition. With the free space you create
two new partitions: a FAT32 for the Win2k system,
and then either a FAT32 or NTFS partition for data.
8Gb would be more than enough space for the Win2k
partition and then use whatever's leftover for the data
partition. Me and others prefer keeping system stuff
separate from data. And I prefer FAT32 for the system
partition in the case of any needed troubleshooting
down the road.
New Xp PC's tend come with a ton of crapware,
including demos, that you should uninstall in any
case. Get rid of any McAfee and Norton stuff
especially if they are just demos. Once you finish
uninstalling the stuff you don't want or need, then
download and install Crap Cleaner from here:
http://www.ccleaner.com. This will purge the
system of a lot of junk files. The end result will be
a smaller Xp system if you want to resize things
down a bit. If you keep Xp, you should do this
anyway, but be sure to replace McAfee or Norton
with a good antivirus software (F-prot, F-Secure, AVG
Pro, etc. Go here for more info:
http://www.claymania.org/anti-virus.html
AVG Pro w/Firewall is only $50 for a 2 yr license
and is probably the "best buy" of the commercial
products.
3) If you do get Win2k running, you'll be pretty
pleased, if not shocked with the performance
increase over the preinstalled Xp. To be fair, though,
a lot of those preinstalled crapware programs will
be responsible for Xp's relative tepid performance,
but still, faster is faster, and it won't slow down like
Xp.
Hope this helps and feel free to totally ignore any
inevitable forthcoming nonsense coming from any
of the MVP's regarding any of this.
-BC
