Windows 2000 Vs Me

**pookie** · 07-23-2003, 12:04 AM

i currently using win me i was trying to see what the difference between win nt ,2000 and windows me im trying to see before i install something i dont want

**hybrid2k4** · 07-23-2003, 12:12 AM

Windows ME sucks ass. win2k kills it easily.
my two cents

**harrycary** · 07-23-2003, 12:16 AM

Windows 2000(and NT, XP, XP Pro) are all based on the NTFS kernel. Rock solid.

Windows ME, based on the FAT kernel, more prone to crashing.

Anyone computer savvy user will recommend you use Win2000.

share on...

**Livy** · 07-23-2003, 12:41 AM

yeah., 2k is pretty stable and i found it faster than win me,
my specs were 500mhz and 256mb ram
i had xp and i was to crap and slow, so i put me on, and it was also crap.
but 2k has been perfect on it.

just ,ake sure u have all the drivers ull need for 2k if u do change.

also win 2k is basically the same as me. looks wise anyway

**scott_hedrick** · 07-23-2003, 01:50 AM

harrycary : No offence intended, but please stop talking such bull****!

Which I certainly agree that Windows 2000 is far superior to Windows ME in every respect other than support for DOS based programs/games, you seem to be confused about the differences between the operating system kernels and the filesystems.

NTFS is a file-system (the preferred flesystem) on NT based machines (NT/2000/XP/2003) which offers support for VERY large harddrives, and also dynamic disks (partitioning on the fly, even while the partition is in use). In addition to that it is much faster for typical uses that FAT.

FAT is the older MS filesystem, and is a relic from the days of DOS, and due to the DOS based architecture of Windows 95/98/ME is still used there.

The difference is that the Windows 95/98/ME kernel is very much inferior to the NT in that it is limited in the amount of RAM, and uses a slower form of addressing when given more that 1GB. Additionally, it has a far worse scheduler, which resuslts in very poor performance compared to NT when multi-tasking - thread context switches took almost 15ms on my machine, while on the same machine, NT performed thread context switches in 4ms - your computer will typically perform 20 of these a second when idle, and upto ~100 when in heavy use with multuple programs.

Then there is hardware support - Windows NT has a MCUH more advanced hardware abstraction layer, and uses a completely different driver model which means that everything runs in kernel space - WAY FASTER.

Also, security protection practically doesnt exist in older Windows kernels which means that a misbehaving program can bring the entire system down pretty easily, whereas Windows NT/2000/XP due to the kernel run each process in a separate memory space and any segment violations will be caught immediately and the offending process killed - or you can do it manually. this results in a much more stable OS.

I could go on forever, but you should get the idea by now - there is no good reason for you not to upgrade to at least Windows 2000, or even XP (even better hardware support, and many improvements in security) unless you want to be able to run very old DOS programs which use low level interrupts in their code.

Hope that helps,

Scott