I'm upgrading my hardware finally and will be installing a system from new, what a fun week that will be.

Should I install XP with SP1a or 2000pro with SP4?
are there particular advantages of each?

Purely subjectively, I prefer Win2K. It leaves out some of the annoying MS frustrations of the UI, and I always seem to have much fewer settings to change right off the bat to get the OS to act the way I want. Too many wizards and little programs trying to do things for me in XP. I've found 2K to be very stable and it's been working well for me for about 4 years now.

Question for XP users: is there a way to make XP's search function to act more like Win2K's? I don't want to be presented with this option every time I open it to search for "files and folders" and whatever other options they have. I just want to search for the damn files and get that freaking dog out of there. Damn Playskool OS.

Yeah you can get rid or the dog. If you just click change preferences on the search sidebar you can turn off animated assistant. Then set it to advanced search so it doesn't ask for what kind of file you are looking for.

XP. It's faster.

Also, check out this article about installing SP1a during the initial install. It's a must if (as I was) you're installing it onto a hard disk > 137Gb in size.

get that freaking dog out of there

TweakUI.

Question for XP users: is there a way to make XP's search function to act more like Win2K's? I don't want to be presented with this option every time I open it to search for "files and folders" and whatever other options they have. I just want to search for the damn files and get that freaking dog out of there. Damn Playskool OS.

Install TweakUI, Go to Explorer category, and check "Use Classic search in Explorer". Kills the dog, and the annoyning new multiple search options.

Also, disable the Themes service to prevent the new interface from showing up anywhere.

Personal preference is XP+SP1 over W2K now. For help on making an integrated XP+SP1 install disk, search for "slipstream" on Google.

XP!....

I suspected most people would say XP. The general consensus, as I gathered, when XP came out was that if you were running MS OS but Win2K, you should upgrade. Otherwise, if you were installing from scratch or, God forbid, you were one of the unlucky ME users, you should go with XP.

I guess I'll be waiting for the next OS to upgrade. Longhorn isn't too apealling at the moment, though. Good thing I'm giving Linux a try

I've found WinXP a lot faster than Win2000 on the same hardware. The bootup on XP is much shorter than 2K anyway. I've turned off the big chunky kiddy interface however.

Longhorn is going to be a few more years before it comes out according to rumour. So the next one after that is going to be a while!
And when it does come out, nothing else will be able to read it's new FS format (WinFS). It's hard enough getting NTFS write support going in Linux.

No no, I wasn't talking about whatever was coming out after that, just Longhorn. I'm not fond of it either.

Ahh okay. Makes sense now. I was thinking you're unusually patient if you're okay to wait around 5-6 years

Well, I suppose it requires a certain amount of patience to be an MS user But most of the time I don't posess that patience

I would also say I'm mainly content. Win2K has given me few problems, and seems to suit me quite well. I'm happy for now

I ran a dual boot for about 6 months (installed 2000, then put XP on top of it on a different partition). Once I figured out how to make the XP interface look "classic" it put it on par with 2000 in that regard.

Obviously, I like XP. To me it seems to be taking 2000 and making it more friendly, as opposed to taking 98 and trying to make it more durable. It has all the good qualities 2000 had, and then some.
Having both O/S's for a while let me do a lot of back to back comparisons, and it was interesting to get a new program and install it onto each. XP seems to boot faster though shut down slower. Programs and such don't seem to change in speed. Gaming benchmarks did increase a few percent however.

What's turned me on about XP (and finally after about a year I reformatted and went with it exclusively) are two things - first it is a no-brainer to connect to a network, such as setting up a cable modem or lugging the machine to someone else's house to play games. When we all ran '98 we'd spend at least 2 hours getting everyone on the network, 2000 dropped that to about an hour (or perhaps we got faster at doing it), and XP involves nothing more than plugging in a cable. Second, even though I generally don't hurt my PC and don't need it babysitting itself, there has been an instance where I staved off reformatting simply by being able to use the built-in restore function XP has.

Obviously I like XP, It's like a more user friendly version of 2000 - has all it's good points, and adds even more.