WHICH WINDOWS DO I CHOOSE?

Windows 98? Millennium Edition? Windows 2000? or Windows XP?

QUESTION:
Is Windows ME worth installing? Should I install Win98 SE, Win ME, Win 2000 Pro, or Windows XP? Id hate to upgrade now, then have to do it again down the road. Any strong opinions? At this point, I am prepared to say that if you are ready for a Windows version upgrade, there is no other choice for most people to make besides Windows XP. This new version of Windows, released October 25, 2001, blows away any general consumer version of Windows that came before it. Windows XP is the convergence point between the stability and power of the NT kernel (which had reached its prior apex in Windows 2000), and a strengthened version of the consumer feature set that has made Windows 9x so popular. The one exception to this recommendation, for general consumers, would be if your hardware will not support XP. The minimal hardware required is a 233 Mhz Pentium with 64 MB of RAM; but I doubt anyone wants to run Windows XP on a computer of that vintage. Ive installed XP on a P -233 with 64 MB of RAM, and know that I wouldnt want that for my computer. It was slow. I mean, SLOW. The good news, though, was that even while it was struggling along, p ushed beyond its hardwares design expectations, it didnt crash. Any version of Win9x would have crashed under that kind of stress and strain. Windows XP didnt. So, what are functional hardware minimums? Opinions will vary on that, of course. For Win XP, RAM is more important than CPU speed, and I would recommend no less than 128 MB. (Get more if you can XP will make use of pretty much any amount of RAM you throw at it.) I havent experimented much with different CPU speeds and XP, but Id hesitate inst alling it on a computer with a non-MMX Pentium. Probably, you should have at least Pentium-II, to take advantage of the 32 KB L1 cache, if you plan to be really happy with the computer.

COMPARING THE OPERATING SYSTEMS

Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP are all excellent operating systems, and even Windows ME can be quite pleasing on the right hardware. There will be some differences in my recommendations according to your particular needs and preferences but, generally, all four are strong. Here are a few differences painting with a very broad brush:

Strength & Stability

Windows 2000 is industrial strength. Turn it on and, if you dont screw with it excessively much, I recommend you reboot the computer at least once a year whether it needs it or not. Windows XP is almost as robust indeed, under identical conditions it may be every bit as robust but its greater focus on leading edge consumer extras (especially for multimedia) puts a greater strain on the system

than has usually been placed on NT-based computers in the past. Win98 will need to be rebooted every 3-6 days. WinME will need it every 1-2 days.

Multimedia & Snaz

Windows 2000 is the least snazzy multimedia bells & whistles OS of the four, but is much stronger in this direction than its predecessor, Windows NT 4. Windows XP is the most snazzy in this department, with Windows ME coming in at a reasonably strong second place. Win98 sits in the middle.

Hardware Compatibility
Windows 98 improved significantly over Windows 95 on the issue of hardware compatibility. You would think that every version thereafter would be a step better, wouldnt you? If so, you would, unfortunately, be wrong. Windows ME had the poorest hardware compatibility of any recent version of Windows for the simple reason that many hardware manufacturers never bothered to create drivers for it. Win ME never had industry support or backing. This is one reason why many of us recommended installing Win ME as an upgrade atop a working Win95 or Win98 system when possible, rather than following conventional wisdom of a clean installation being more stable than an upgrade. Win ME as an upgrade would retain the drivers of the earlier version if it didnt have one of its own and, more often than not, these would work adequately. Windows 2000 was better at hardware support than Win98 in some ways, and worse than Win98 in other ways. Windows 2000, like its NT predecessors, relies heavily on the published hardware compatibility list. If your hardware is on the HCL, the support is excellent. If not (as is true of quite a lot of legacy hardware), the support is poor. Since each OS does pretty well with hardware that is immediately contemporary to it, this causes me to rank Windows 2000 a little behind Win98 in hardware support. But only a little. Windows XP has, by far, more hardware support than any version of Windows ever released. If I am recalling correctly, at the time of its launch it supported three times as many hardware items as Win98, and this number doubled in the first six months of its release. Among older hardware, old scanners are probably the category most likely not to work in Win XP but most of these didnt work in Win ME either. Due to rapid advances in scanner technology, the major scanner manufacturers, in many cases, have made the decision not to take old serial and SCSI scanner support past Win98.

System Resource Depletion

Consumption of free System Resources has been an important and frustrating issue in Windows 9 x, at least for many users, due to an architecture that was necessary for the backwards compatibility that has been so important in Windows 9x. With greater emphasis, in recent years, on multimedia functions, graphics-enabled programs, and Internet-enabled programs, as well as more powerful hardware encouraging users to more aggressively multitask, System Resource consumption has become a very serious issue.

The great news is that both Windows 2000 and Windows XP, being based on the NT-kernel, do not have the particular architecture that causes this problem. In fact, the term System Resources, as understood in Win 9x, is so not an issue that the term is used for something else altogether! Win98 and Win ME do, however, have this problem. Of the two, Win98 handles it far, far better. System Resource consumption and management in Win ME are worse than in any other version of Windows.

Managing the Underbelly

Regarding user management of the underbelly of the system, Windows Millennium Edition (ME) allows the least of it, Windows 2000 allows and requires the most of it, and Win98 sits in the middle. Win98 is the only one of the four that has real mode DOS (with all the advantages and disadvantages of that). Windows XP sits outside the framework within which Ive spoken of the others. When it requires underbelly maintenance, XP closely resembles 2000, meaning that it is more difficult than most (non tech) users usually will want to undertake. The other side of the coin, though, is that Microsoft really seems to have reached a level of self-maintenance with Win XP that simply isnt present in any of its predecessors. The typical user is far less likely ever to have to do underbelly management. All four operating systems have excellent tools for system maintenance, in a way that leaves Windows 95 in the dust. Windows 2000 demands a higher level of skill in using these; Windows XP and ME require the least, and are the only ones that have something theoretically approaching a button for, Ooh! my system got kablooied, please put it back the way it was before I broke it. This System Restore feature is much better enabled in XP than in ME.

Upgrade Paths
Windows 98 will give you upgrade paths to all of the others if you choose. None of the others does. (All three of the earlier operating systems have upgrade paths to Windows XP.) In other words, of the operating systems discussed here: Windows 98 will upgrade to Windows ME, Windows 2000, or Windows XP Windows ME will upgrade only to Windows XP. (In actuality, you can upgrade it to Windows 2000 also, though this is not supported.) Windows 2000 will upgrade only to Windows XP.

THE FUTURE...
The future for Windows is unquestionably in the Windows NT kernel, which is the foundation of Windows 2000 and XP, rather than in the 9x kernel on which Windows 95, 98, and ME were built. The real question is: When is the best time for this future to reach you, personally? We have already seen a very aggressive push by Microsoft to migrate people toward Windows XP, and this surely will continue. This push is probably justified, since the migration to the NT kernel is something just about everyone in the industry has been awaiting for a long time. Windows XP is the consumer version of Windows that everyone has been waiting for since Win95 first hit the streets. Expectations are appropriately

high. Within the next few years, Win98 and Win ME will run the course of their MS support cycle, though online newsgroup and other non-Microsoft support channels will exist for years to come. (The primary Windows 98 support cycle ends in June 2002.) A few people, who are very happy with Windows 98, will simply stay with it for a long time, especially if their hardware is contemporary to Win98s release and may not behave as well with a later OS. Essentially all new computers will be sold with XP-family operating systems beginning Christmas season 2001, and a majority of people will make the switch to either the Professional or Home Edition of Windows XP soon after. All other things being completely and totally equal, of the Windows operating systems available prior to the release of Windows XP, I personally would use Windows 98 as my operating system of choice. Win98 (either version) is the high-water mark of the Win 9x OS family. On my computer, though, all things are not totally equal. Win98 has a stupid conflict Ive never been able to resolve that hangs my modem unless I go into device manager and delete it each time before I shut down or reboot. This allows it to reinstall and work fine on the next reboot. Against that, I have never gotten my scanner working on Win ME (or, for that matter, on 2000 or XP). But I use my modem constantly, and my scanner a few times a year. And, of course, Win ME boots much faster (its major marketing point, if you trust the ads!). So, I run Win ME as my secondary OS (Win XP is now my primary OS), and keep my Win98 partition intact on the system for when I want it. If I had ever taken the time to get one or the other problem solved so that either one of them gives me both hardware fixes, I would have dropped the other one, and used the liberated partition to try again to install Windows 2000 which, every other time I tried, would never recognize my USB port. So, as you can see, none of them is perfect. But then, neither am I. So there. Ranking Each OS on Criteria (5-point scale) Win 98 Strength, Stability Multimedia, Snaz Hardware Compatibility System Resources Underbelly Management TOTAL: AVERAGE SCORE: 3 3 4 3 3 16 3.2 Win ME 2 4 2 1 3 12 2.4 Win 2K 5 2 3 5 3 18 3.6 Win XP 4 5 5 5 4 23 4.6