Hey guys… I need some computer advice. I was recently given a CD burner as a gift. It’s one that can work with Windows or Mac, but what I didn’t know was that it only takes Windows 2000 and up.
I have a laptop computer that I bought in 1997, which runs on Windows 95. Its memory is just about filled to the gills
with all the stuff I’ve saved on it the last couple of years - hence the CD burner to free up some space.
My question is this: If I were to upgrade this old laptop to Windows 2000, would it be significantly slower than it should be? Would it be worth it? It seems like more and more PC software is being made for Windows 2000 and higher.
If your laptop is as “filled to the gills” as my bladder right now, you may not even be able to get Win2k installed.
According to the MS site the requirements for Win2k (Professional, which is the smallest version) are:
[ul]
[li]133 MHz or higher Pentium-compatible CPU.[/li][li]64 megabytes (MB) of RAM recommended minimum; more memory generally improves responsiveness[/li][li] 2GB hard disk with a minimum of 650 MB of free space.[/li][/ul]
So if you don’t have that then its kind of a moot point. If you can squeek it out I would say go for it because once you get the burner working you can un-“fill to the gills” your computer.
Another thing th keep in mind is that Win2k is the new version of Win NT (MS’s business operating system) and may not “play well” with things like games, graphics, and intensive multimedia programs. If that’s the kinda thing you’re into then you might wanna check out Windows ME.
As far as slowness, that is more a combination of your CPU and RAM, not how much you have saved on your hard drive. I would susoect that since Win2k has more features than Win95 that it might run slower, but, hey, what’s a few nanoseconds among friends?
Windows 2000 is for the office. IF you put it on your laptop, chances are you won’t have most of the drivers you need for the rest of the computer but you might be able to use the writer. Whistler is the version of Windows 2000 which has the drivers for home PCs.
I upgraded my home network to Win2k…on my new P4 1.4GHz it runs fine. On my P2 366 laptop, it is, well, slow. A lot of hard drive grinding for everything. But, it is a lot more stable, and the suspend and hibernation features started working again (they wouldn’t work in 98).
Another major hassle I had was finding drivers for everything, and reinstalling all of my software.
