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"War of the Windows."

I have a relatively old (2000?) computer which has an ME operating system. I HATE having to use ME, due to it's amazingly poor memory handling abilities. It has crashed many times before due to a lack of systems resources ( I have the meter up at all times to make sure it doesn't crash). It also doesn't have the ability to run iTunes, which is useless me being an iPod owner. So I considered upgrading to XP.

I thought this would be a be all and end all solution, but an annoying little bird in my ear(perhaps cos they're right and that defeats me, or perhaps cos they're wrong and obstructing me) says that it's very hasslesome.

This is because I would need a whole new set of drivers.

So, to come down to the point:

Which is better; ME or XP?

Is it possible for me to convert to XP with relative ease and few expenses?

XP will run on 450 MHz/128 MB RAM in my experience. It wasn't a particularly nice experience though.

It is considerably better in many ways though than ME. I don't dispute that. ME however wasn't as bad as most people make out. I found it to be the best in the Windows 9x range and it was stable enough if you knew what you were doing. The other benefit to the Windows 9x (that's 95, 98, 98SE, ME in case you didn't realise) is that most current worms, the majority in the past few years, all exploited holes in XP/2000/NT but NOT Windows 9x.

Bottom line though is that if you have a computer from the past 4 years, then go with Windows XP. Best option out there. Older than that and you have to decide whether slow but stable is better than fast but possibly not as stable.

Yeh 1.4 is more than enough. My spare PC runs XP Pro at 400Mhz and really doesn't seem to have any problems.

It's running (pro) fine on my 648mhz, 128MB laptop!

I've run XP on a 1GHZ machine before and it performs well enough.

Afternoon wrote:
> How fast is the machine as if you do not have a powerful processor
> from 2000 you may find XP will be very sluggish (although it won't
> crash half as much as ME)

That's what I could see as one of the few problems, myself. It's a 1.4, so an upgrade to XP might need a 2.3/4

Is use ME on this desktop, and XP on my laptop. Put it this way: it's called ME for a reason.

How fast is the machine as if you do not have a powerful processor from 2000 you may find XP will be very sluggish (although it won't crash half as much as ME)

I went and fixed a friend of mines machine who was using ME.

Before, her machine was riddled with viruses, spyware and worms that had managed to exploit the loopholes ME exposed.

She's now got a fully reformatted XP (SP2'd system) that's firewalled, virus protected and pretty much sorted.

Moral of story?

ME is w**k.

> Buy XP Home

Make sure you go for the Service Pack 2 edition, it'll save you downloading it later.

> reformat the drive (NTFS)

Format your drive to start a fresh as normal, but select NTFS as opposed to FAT32. Just know that the NTFS set-up is a lot better for your system. If you pop in the XP CD it should do this for you, as well as partition it.

> install XP in the partition

The partition will be created after you format the drive. Nothing to worry about unless you start making multiple partitions. The hard drive you're using now is on a single partition, so it'll be nothing new to learn once XP is installed.

I think the driver problems was only with the early editions of XP.

Its on SP2 now, and all my old crap works fine with it. Like my 7 year old HP 690C printer. Vintage.