'Bout time to throw money away on a new 'chine. So, no need for respondees to spend a lot of time debating or creating long messages...my question is between two choices: W2K or XP (and, I guess, XP Pro). Which you think is best for Poser? Bad experiences/good experiences? (added info: P4, 1 GB RAM) Tks in advance!

Now or in two year? I fell W2K is a better OS now. A lot less problem than XP Pro. In two year, after sp3, maybe sp4(LOL) XP Pro will be the better OS. So my question is do want it NOW or later?

can you even get win2k anymore? I use XP Home since there is not a sig difference for my purposes. It is almost as good as win2K, some ways better, if you strip out all the new UI garbage. There are some image browsing features that are better.

My sister was able to get 2000 for her laptop a couple of months ago (I think - for some strange reason she hides it when I visit).

I got a P4 2.0Ghz with 1GB Ram and XP home works really well, haven't had a single hangup with poser so far, 2months and counting, 1 thing tho if you've got anything that only uses Dos say goodbye to it, I can't get a single old Dos program to work even with the compatability thingy.

Rob

I like the MWOWM O/S, though unfortunately, most store-bought machines get fried by the alien technology.

Taelon is better, integrates right into your brain which is where windows may go next, that's it Bill Gates is a Taelon. Rob

I have a VERY old DOS game called Stronghold (rather nice god-sim actually, no relation to the present title-user) and it runs fine (if silently) under XP - so that's one!

If you have more than one machine and can only afford one OS stay away from XP, you can only register it on one machine at a time according to the rep I talked to at Microsoft. I can only use one of my machines at a time, so I opted to stay with win2k pro. Marque

Everything I have put on my win2k system has worked without problems, all the games and software and all the hardware, since the day I bought it which was the day it came out. And I play all the games...lol You might want to load your dos sound drivers into your autoexec bat, that's why you have no sound. 8^) That's what I did for my old Duke Nukem game. Marque

I'm with Marque on that one. Win2k Pro is GREAT! XP is designed for one OS and one PROGRAM per OS. EVERY PROGRAM must be registered to each machine, so ALL OF YOUR PROGRAMS must be purchased for each machine even of your machines are on a network. If you're a small company with a few machines, the software expense can be overwhelming. XP eliminates about 50% of the benefit of operating on a network... But I understand. Bill doesn't have enough money yet. pg

You do not have to purchase every program for every machine with Win XP. It depends on the license, but XP itself doesn't care. XP does care if you install the same copy of XP on another machine though. I used to use Win 2K, and no serious problems except for finding that half of my programs didn't work anymore. I didn't lock up much, maybe just 1 or 2 lockups a day. I have found that XP hasn't locked up on me since I bought it when it came out. And, as a bonus, every program I have tried with the exception of PBooost has worked including the ones that wouldn't under Win2K. PBoost does work somewhat, it just doesn't work at the same time as Poser because of the file system. That would be true most likely with Win2K also. Although my experience has been that XP Pro is the best OS from Microsoft, your mileage may vary.

JCleaver, that's what I said, you are not allowed to use the OS on more than one machine at a time, I didn't say anything about the programs. "you can only register it on one machine at a time according to the rep I talked to at Microsoft" Actually PBoost is the one program that doesn't work on mine either...pity. That is the only program I've had a problem with. Marque

I have a beta of Windows 95, does that count?

Well, I use W98 right now. Hearing that W2K only locked up once or twice a day scares me as my W98 only locks up on me about once a week. I use W2K at work and it's stable for what I use it for. As to XP, and the discussion about privacy and intrusion, it is touted as making sure you only use the OS on one PC by transmitting the configuration (about 17 items from your PC). HOWEVER, who really knows what else they check for? Would it be prudent of them to check for duplicate serial numbers of other software packages and transmit (behind your back, so to speak) that info back to them? Mind you, I have nothing to worry about as I have legal copies of everything I use on my PC and my wife's...it just bothers me that XP has the ability to gather info and send it to MS. Who knows what they are gathering. And for what purposes. NOW, having said that, I might consider it if it was a really stable OS. For example, our LAN manager ordered a PC for his 13-yr-old and after setting it up, it crashed when he tried to load a WAV file. I was looking for info concerning stability like that. As to getting a copy of W2K, it's hard to get. When I order the PC, I will be paying for a copy of XP as they do not offer anything else (planned obselescence). However, I would not consider it "stealing" if I were to discard that OS and load a copy of W2K from my office. After all, MS got their money from me for an OS and that shouldbe all they are really concerned about.

My thoughts are, if you can get it, and you are looking at standard apps and hardware (not freaky video cards that do video capture, and whatnot) win2k is the better choice. I can't say there is anything wrong with XP preventing you from running it on multiple machines simultaneously, but each time you modify your machine, hardware wise, you risk eating one of your "installation" priveledges. Considering that I upgrade hw when money is available, and reinstallation of windows is a natural part of having a "working" OS, I will avoid it, if possible, when getting a new machine (so much so, that I will probably be buying a Mac) If you are playing games, XP is probably the best choice. I can't vouch for it's stability, but I doubt it is any less stable that win2k. I certainly don't recommend ME (if that were a choice). Do keep in mind, that XP home is effectively a castrated version of XP pro. Don't plan on using any of the advanced security features, join a domain as well as several other subtle features if you get the home version. That is MS way of forcing those businesses who have been using 9x to use their "business" class os. If you don't care for these features, then no problem, just be aware of the differences before you spend the money. We got burned with a couple of laptops, that were licensed for XP Home once it was released. After the user's did their homework, it was too late to send the CDs back to get the appropriate version. As a result, we had to buy a couple of copies of XP Pro. Not a huge loss, but irritating none the less. eric eh.... sorry for the lengthiness

Marque, I was responding to Pamola's post. I probably should have cut & pasted.

Ok, I'll put down the shotgun...lol Marque

oohh the infernal eternal debate. only using linux and win98 refuse to buy another version of win. and soon to not have win at all, as x-windowing system for the unix based os is much better than windows. after six months, I only managed to completely lock linux up once..and that was telling it to do something when I knew it shouldn't. ( I ran a system config tool after system was up and running. ) during the same six months, win crashed, trashing hd five times, locked up repeatedly. unix x-windowing os, linux and mac.

Or you could get lucky and work at a University where they give you a version of XP that doesnt check the network for copies, it doesnt even check microsoft, heck there isnt even a serial number needed. But that is only really usefull at work, where we may have to put it on 30 or so faculty and staff machines.

Before my computer died (due to hardware incompatibility), I used XP Home edition and so does my husband at the moment and we have had not one single problem. When my new computer is fixed, I will be going back to XP Home edition. :) My poser worked fine on it with no problems at all, but then I only had poser installed for aobut 2 or so weeks before my computer died and I was still in the learning processes of poser.

MS has eased up a bit on what you can do with your machine with XP before you have to phone home for re-validation. So that's not really a problem. I think you can even reformat and all that good stuff. I'm not on a network, just use XP at home so I have no thoughts/info/rants on networking with XP vs Win2K. Oh, I got mine from Dell with XP installed. XP already 'validated' or whatever it's called. XP is very very stable. I have only (only?) 512 megs of ram but have never run into any problems. If you let it, I do, it can use a lot of memory for caching. I use Explorer in thumbnail view which is so fantastic it's worth getting XP just for that...especially for us graphics types! And it caches everything! But whenever I need the memory, voila, it's there for me. No problems...I really like XP. Spit

I am on a home network and use XP Home (when my new computer was working) I only had 256 mb ram and a 1 gig celeron processor and didn't have a proplem with it at all :).

I agree with everyone who loves thier WinXP but I have two questions. If your CPU fan dies unexpetedly and your CPU fries can you replace it and boot WinXP back up? If you want to up grade your CPU will WinXP let you? I didn't like the ansers I've gotten on that so far. At work Win2KPro SP2 is rock solid and mine at home has been buggy(Maybe unlisted hardware incompatabilities)

Ok, the answer to this one as it comes from my husband who has a lot to do with XP on the machine he builds is Yes and Yes. XP is actually less likely to spit the dummy because of a sudden failure such as you describe than any of the previous versions including NT. Because XP uses a NT core with more modern peripherals it is a great OS and this is coming from someone who previously hated but endured earlier MS OS's. It is however a little bit picky about hardware maybe a little more or less so than NT and Win 2K. Basically, imagine NT stability and Win 98's ability to play games and other multimedia events. Just very quickly in reply to Eric's post above, Home edition is not a "casterated" version, it is the same critter except minus the networking tools and so on. And Chuck, you don't have to validate XP online, you can do it across the phone if you wish. This way you know it isn't sending anything to MS it shouldn't. It doesn't but some people undestandably prefer a little more security due to the very low trust levels in Microsoft.

Bella: I (thank the Lord) now have cable and when I turn the PC on, I am connected. And with XP running the show, so to speak, who knows what really goes across the line. As an example...I have never figured this one out: You get notification of critical updates, so you go to MS site to get the update and it says to you...this update is being done without taking any information from your PC (or words to that effect). Now, I ask you...how does it know what updates I need unless it "interrogates" my PC?

Chuck, it works because your machine is interrogating their server. To give an idea of my recent experience, I upgraded my motherboard, CPU, video card, and RAM and I did not have to revalidate my Win XP install. I don't know why I didn't have to, but I'm not complaining!

Chuck: What happens is around about once a day your machine sends a list of updates that it has installed to check it against the master list on the MS update server, if it does not match it will notify you of the ones that are missing. If you think this is a problem you can set it to manual updates. Jcleaver: I think the only hardware that XP is linked to is the harddrive so therefore most upgrades that people do won't affect them. All this information is curteously supplied by my husband ;)

XP is fine, provided you leave in "newbie" mode and change nothing. If you try to change to many things, it gets real unstable real fast. I'm using the Pro version, with the official guide "for admins" by MS press and still the damn thing died... So, much like anything else MS has ever done, don't customise it, and use only one app at a time and you'll be fine. Oh, and make sure you use NTFS for both boot and data partitions, and make sure your boot partition is at least 4Gb, don't ask me why, but XP eats drive space. later jb

For those of you worried about MS spyware and the fact that you can oly run it one machine there is a patch for both. There is a program called XPantispy which stops it "phoning home" and there's a hack that gets rid of the registration box, and resets the 30 day registration clock each time you reboot, you should be able to find both with google. later jb

I recently switched from Win98 to XP. Boy what a difference. I had constant rendering lockups in 98. Now EVERYTHING runs at least 4 times faster. For some reason my cable modem speed increased by a factor of 4 to 10. I was able to get patches for my periphs (printer and scanner) for free. Poser hasn't locked up yet. Some games won't work. Ultima IX claims that XP is mainly for businesses?. All in all it's the best investiment I've made in a long time.

I have run both and havent really noticed any performance increases in Poser with one over the other. WindowsXP, which I am using now, has an overall better interface, but still has its share of bugs. I just dont like the way it dumbs everything down like we are all a bunch of idiots. And there is a lot of extra crap that you not only dont want or need, but actually wish was not there. Windows 2000 is a good operating system, but if you dont know quite a lot about computers then XP is probably a better choice for you. I havent had too many problems with it yet.

Whew, Praxis, I was starting to feel left out. I loathe XP. Sure, if you never touch anything or try to customize, it's fine. I don't WANT my computer to think for me. I don't want it to decide what particular mode is best for what I'm doing. I've managed to crash Poser in XP, twice. Once, because the Memory Manager failed and crashed and took Windows with it (fun, fun), and the other time, I was using the trenchcoat. That blasted thing always seems to do it, even on a monster machine like this one.

Win 2000 Pro works well for me! ;-) I understand the new SP3 for it includes a lot of the "Bill needs to know all about your computer" stuff that XP already had, though. All I can say is curse you, Bill Gates! If Macs only weren't so expensive and so slow and ran Max!

hmm, winxp pro that Stormrage is using cashes at least twice a week, no modification done to it. remove the m$ spyware from running and it settled it down a bit. now only had hd power flicker five or six times a day. yup it is windows doing this, because when I ran linux on the exact same machine, there were absolutely no problems with the hd nor a single crash. yesterday, I was just plaing around with the hair / tree feature and hit render, by by poser in about a quarter second under xp. never did that under 98. took the hd out of her comp to fix another one, had to completely re-install xp as it had lost all data about being installed. xp a good os? not from what I have seen. and nope, I wasn't impressed with 2000, or 98, or nt. ~wandering off to install corel on my linux box to grab a screen shot of the display for the arguement about linux being console.~

S He may like Linux and I will admit it's a more stable operating system but until they come up with my programs in a Linux version I will stick with Windows. I like XP.. But because it seems to be more stable than 95 or 98 for what I am doing

"XP is designed for one OS and one PROGRAM per OS. EVERY PROGRAM must be registered to each machine, so ALL OF YOUR PROGRAMS must be purchased for each machine even of your machines are on a network. If you're a small company with a few machines, the software expense can be overwhelming. XP eliminates about 50% of the benefit of operating on a network... But I understand."

This is completely incorrect. I have absolutely no idea where a rumor like this gets started - but it isn't true at all.

Yes, windows XP does tie an OS registration to one machine at a time so you (gasp) can't pirate the OS like some people used to do but that's life in the big city - eventually you have to pay for something.

You CAN transfer the OS from one machine to another without problem, and there has yet to be a single instance of anyone "running out" of upgrade instances with a single copy of XP and hardware updates. Further, OEM versions of XP don't check hardware at all outside of brand... so no matter what you do with/to your Dell or whatever that XP will keep running.

"I agree with everyone who loves thier WinXP but I have two questions. If your CPU fan dies unexpetedly and your CPU fries can you replace it and boot WinXP back up? If you want to up grade your CPU will WinXP let you? I didn't like the ansers I've gotten on that so far. At work Win2KPro SP2 is rock solid and mine at home has been buggy(Maybe unlisted hardware incompatabilities) "

Yes, it will boot and run if you replace your CPU :) Windows XP doesn;t really care what CPU you run.

In short, it's like this. If you simultaneously change 3 MAJOR components of your XP it then updates it's registration keys with the MS systems to make sure you didn't "clone" it onto a new machine.

NO NUMBER OF CHANGES OR UPGRADES TO A SINGLE MACHINE WILL EVER DISABLE XP.

The problem WOULD come in if you had two identical machiens and pirated XP from oen to the other, upgrades that caused the systems to diverge would eventually cause one of them to become unregistered.

"I (thank the Lord) now have cable and when I turn the PC on, I am connected. And with XP running the show, so to speak, who knows what really goes across the line."

Easy... a lot of hacker types are checking every MS OS out there just DYING to find something incriminating or damaging being sent across the wire so they can sue MS again. They have the hardware and skills needed to watch the network.

No competitive advantage MS could possibly get from peeking at your "Quicken" file could ever compensate them for the potential damages that would result from exposure of snooping.

"As an example...I have never figured this one out: You get notification of critical updates, so you go to MS site to get the update and it says to you...this update is being done without taking any information from your PC (or words to that effect). Now, I ask you...how does it know what updates I need unless it "interrogates" my PC?"

It's called "ActiveX. Windows Update is a component that lives on YOUR machine. It gets a list of current updates from the server and matches them locally with your configuration. Your configuration is NOT sent to MS.

"XP is fine, provided you leave in "newbie" mode and change nothing. If you try to change to many things, it gets real unstable real fast. I'm using the Pro version, with the official guide "for admins" by MS press and still the damn thing died..."

I customize XP pretty heavily on our systems for different tasks, and have NEVER had a problem like this.

"Oh, and make sure you use NTFS for both boot and data partitions, and make sure your boot partition is at least 4Gb, don't ask me why, but XP eats drive space."

Go check the size of your "system restore" settings and your trash can.

"S He may like Linux and I will admit it's a more stable operating system but until they come up with my programs in a Linux version I will stick with Windows."

I have yet to see any evidence that Linux is generically more stable as an OS. I admin both on a daily basis and baring planned reboots for upgrades neither system should crash when properly set up (note that this isn't true for recent Linux kernels... they are getting LESS stable as time goes on).

soulhuntre, I'm running the newest linux kernel and can't force my machine to even lock up, never mind crash. using mandrake, which is bleeding edge software, the most unstable linux distro available. when I got free corel photo paint for linux it actually started / installed a stable version of wine windows emulator, so I can run wine and then run windows apps with it now. and, since the insmod boot errors seem to have locked out the printscreen function somehow, I can't get screenshot to show the KDE gui that comes with all linux distributions now, on top of gnome and around seven other guis. kde seems to use the resources the least, leaving more for the applications, so I actually removed all the other ui options. I do boot into command prompt, by choice, as there are times the console allows you to accomplish something that otherwise would require a full install to fix. win 95 and up starts removing that option for you. 2k and xp both do not have the option at all.

"I'm running the newest linux kernel and can't force my machine to even lock up, never mind crash.
using mandrake, which is bleeding edge software, the most unstable linux distro available."

I am sure the folks at Mandrake are working hard to make sure you don't get bitten. I suggest you look at the kernel developer mailing list before making assumptions about the inherent stability of the system. The 2.5 IDE system is so broken that many developers have backported the 2.4 system to it and by Linus's own statements the SCSI subsystem is seriously out of date and unmaintained for years.

"Ehh, since there is no proactive maintainer for SCSI, I don't have much choice, do I?

SCSI has been maintainerless for the last few years. Right now three people work on it to some degree (Doug Ledford, James Bottomley and you), but I don't get timely patches, and neither does apparently anybody else." - Linux Torvolds

Obviously it is possible to have stable Linux systems - I administer several of them. But there are serious issues that must be taken into account to assure that - the OS itself is not inherently more stable than it's competitors and certainly no advance over 2K/Xp.

"when I got free corel photo paint for linux it actually started / installed a stable version of wine windows emulator, so I can run wine and then run windows apps with it now."

Wine is an impressive hack, but hardly ready for prime time for many applications... and the folks that work on it will be the first to say that. it works OK for specific applications, but it is far from a general solution and the project itself has interesting internal dissent issues. Again, the mailing list for developers has some interesting information.

"and, since the insmod boot errors seem to have locked out the printscreen function somehow, I can't get screenshot to show the KDE gui that comes with all linux distributions now, on top of gnome and around seven other guis."

To be honest, there is really only one GUI - the X-Windows system. Gnome and KDE are more accurately termed "window managers" and certainly do some really, really cool stuff. The problem is that much of the basic functionality is still not available in a consistent way. Heck, COPY/PASTE is not universal across applications.

I really like KDE - Gnome is visually interesting but the underlying framework is showing it's hodge podge development history. It really is down to Gnome or KDE these days - while there are any number of little window dressing managers (heck, even I wrote one at AT&T way, way back) the reality is that they don't matter very much. BTW - here are some KDE screenshots... this one is my favorite. Of course, it is fairly easy to radically customize windows too ... look familiar?

*"I do boot into command prompt, by choice, as there are times the console allows you to accomplish something that otherwise would require a full install to fix.

win 95 and up starts removing that option for you. 2k and xp both do not have the option at all."*

You are incorrect, in both 2K and XP I have the option to boot into a command prompt if need be to fix a problem preventing the GUI from loading.

Enjoy :)