George04

I am planning to do some upgrading of my computer. I currently have PS7 and am not in a position to upgrade to PSCS. I am using Win 2000 Pro. Someone has suggested I might have better results with PS7 but changing my OS to Win XP. I have plenty of memory and hard drive. Please, can I have any comments, pros, cons on this subject.
For you consideration. I will be doing a lot of photographic work in PS7 as I am about ready to open a photo studio. I will also be offering photo retouching services.
George

The Coach

XP is slightly better than W2k, but don't expect any shocking things. I can come up with a fact list of thing that have improved in XP, not based on a personal view, but on a technical view.
However, I see no areas of improvement that would make PS7 run better on XP than Win2k. I would not advice you to upgrade if you would only do it to getter better results with PS7; it would be a waste of money.

Btw, I don't know if things have changed, but most graphic designers I talked with more than year ago preferred Win2k over XP.

Blinky2004

I agree with Joe. And i've also heard that Win2K is a more preferable choice.

George04

Thanks for your input. I kind of got the idea that my computer guru was trying to sell me something.
I am very comfortable with Win 2000 Pro and really do not want to change unless absolutely necessary.
It has been tough enough learning PS7 and I still have a long ways to go to master that.
George

jaylsb

No reason to switch that I've ever heard of. In fact, I prefer 2000 over XP by a longshot. My network is comprised of 90% win2k and the remainder are XP and one Windows 98 pc. Everything is so much easier on Win2k, maybe it's because I know it like the back of my hand, but it seems that XP was made for home pc's, and it hinders any real configuration changes in a networked environment, things are alot more difficult.

I'll stick with Win2k until I absolutely need to change.

J

Bacardi

When I assembled my PC, the shop owner gave me XPPro as an extra (I'd been assembling several puters and all parts came from his shop). I installed it, and I like it. I find it shocking that in a "pro" version you still get that set of silly games, messenger, gaming zone and other kind of rubbish. With some internal tweaking and msconfig much can be done about several "services", but still...
But if he hadn't given it, I would still be using 2000.
No need to upgrade imo when we talk Photoshop.

reasons to ugrade are:
1/ you have a processor that can work with hyperthreading
2/ you want to sponsor BG

etc etc etc

Sark

Hi.

I'm currently running PS7 on Win 2K Pro without any problems. Certainly nothing to suggest an upgrade would improve things.

I like Win 2K because it's easy to reformat and it also uses just 55mb of RAM on my system. I've heard XP is much hungrier.

Also, I don't have the internet on my home PC, and I get the impression, XP benefits from being on a system that's connected to the web?

Sark

Bacardi

Which is why I uncheck several of the "services" on the tab of the same name in msconfig. Things like that "shall I warn microsof about that naughty app that you had to close by force?", Messenger, netmeeting etc etc...

You also get more options to uninstall Microsoft components by editing a certain file. Here, you may not make a mistake though as it's a system file.

My workhorse/desktop only connected to the Internet to activate the OS and the application that needed it.
Apart from that, there isn't even a network connection. All transfers are done with a memory stick. This puter is about as safe as a puter that connects to the net can be: I surf with Mozilla or Opera, have a virusscanner, Spyware search and destroy and a firewall against script kiddies and dishonest apps that want to connect without me knowing it. Against a real attack I have no hope: I know I am defenseless. But why would someone try to hack me huh?

And if anything goes wrong: everthing is back-upped on an external HDD, the workhorse's second HDD and on CDRoms. So I can simply uninstall everything and less than an hour later I'm back online.
As for the workhorse: I have another HDD stored with all apps etc ready on it. So there it's a question of less than ten minutes.

I also have a reduced version of XPPro burned on a cd. I can run that and, in case of OS failure, I'm still able to save all files.

retired_Craig

If I am not mistaken, Win2kPro doesn't support NTSF formatted hard drives! NTFS formatting is faster than FAT32 but not by much. The real culprit to increasing speed is closing any unneccesary apps that windows runs on startup and making sure that they don't load up the next time you boot. Junction that with a hard drive that has a bigger cache file size (2MB or 8MB) -- this helps alot!! I changed out my old 20G drive for a new 40G drive with 2MB cache, formatted to NTSF and noticed a definite improvement!! Other than that, I guess it doesn't really matter which OS you use! It's more of a hardware issue than an OS issue!!

ladyfinger007

Mflintjer, (Welcome to PsG!)
Sorry, but NTFS is the default formatting for all the NT based OS (Win 2K is NT5, and XP is considered as NT 5.1)

Also, keep in mind that the 40GB disk is more recent than the 20GB one. ITs areal density is bigger, thus it is faster. But indeed the 8MB of cache helps (most current HD's use it, some even have 16MB!)
---
The very first think you should do if you intend to use XP is getting rid of that blue theme (luna) to a grey one. Personnaly, I kept the classic mode)
It's always better to use a neutral color for your interface when you do color corrections, etc.