What's better? Win2000 or WinXP?

[Capholland]

Has anybody tried both of these, and could make a recommendation as to which of these two operating systems FS2002 would perform better under (frame-rate or otherwise). Thanks. My hardware is:

AMD Athlon 800mhz processor
196MB RAM
Nvidia TNT2 (with latest certified drivers)

-Capholland
http://flightsimmers.net/va/caphollands

[lazerin]

WinXP is your best bet. XP is an enhanced version of win2k and has much better support for gaming (direct3d etc).

However, with your current setup, don't expect too much from fs2k2. Fs is very demanding on hardware. I reckon you'll be seeing around 20-30fps max.

Hope this helps
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[cascadesss]

I doubt he will see a FPS rate anywhere near 20+ considering his CPU speed and very low memory. WinXP is a good operating system if you have a fast processor and lots of memory.

Rick - KPDX - Private Pilot
http://www.iqthost.com/orpcax/images/PSA.jpg
Dual XP1800's..1G RAM..MSI Ti-4600
4-SCSI Drives w/Raid 0..WinXP
2-120G WD Drives .. 3 Monitors

[beernut]

I used FS 2002 on Win 2000 for a few months with good performance. After awhile I switched to Win XP pro and the FS performance dropped noticeably. Would lock up occasionally, too. After trying many different driver combinations with no improvement, I decided to go back to Win 2000. Works great ever since.

Others may have different experiences. This was mine.

[jwenting]

With your hardware I'd stay away from Windows XP.
Personally, I do not recommend using Windows XP unless you have at least 512MB RAM (especially when running heavy applications like MSFS on it).

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[Fireball]

Hi,

I am a computer professonal - ie I build and install systems for a living.

I highly recommend Windows XP now that Service Pack 1 is available. This fixes the little niggles and so on and makes it extremely stable.

I would advise against getting Windows XP "Home" edition as this has quite a bit "missing". Go for the XP Professional version which is the full product.

To run XP you need at least 256Mb RAM (They quote 64 but trust me!). RAM is cheap though (256 is about £45 in the UK) so buy as much as you can. 512Mb will be sweet.

I run both Windows 2000 and XP on my network and far prefer XP. Keep up to date with the auto-updates and you won't go far wrong.

As far as FS2002 and XP/2K are concerned I run it on two of my machines. It runs smoother on my XP machine. Both are 2Ghz Intels.

If you are suffering performance issues it is probably down to your graphics card. Can you afford an upgrade? The new NVidia cards are far better than your TNT2 and some are very reasonably priced. FS2002 is incredibly power hungry and a GEForce 4 or even versoin 3 graphics card with 64Mb (or 128 if you are flush!) will make a world of difference.

Good luck!

Fireball

[Capholland]

Thanks for all the replies ... actually, I made a mistake in my original posting. I have 296MB RAM, not 196 (little typo, big difference ;-) and currently have my target frame rate set to 16, which my current setup manages to keep up with quite nicely, though I don't max out all the sliders. Still, the results are acceptable. Was just wondering if there was a night-and-day difference between the two OSs. Stability is always nice. I'll give the various upgrade options a bit more thought, but yeah, probably should go for a new graphics card regardless. Thanks again.

-Capholland
http://flightsimmers.net/va/caphollands

[McFlysky]

WindowsXP!