Friend of mine has an old Compaq with 1.2ghz athlon with 128mb PC800ram, 30gig(2 partitions), 32mb tnt video card with XP Pro on it. His system performance suffers when he gets on the 'Net and plays music and works in Word and Excel all at the same time. I keep it clean for him with ccleaner and other malware cleaners but obviously, he needs more ram. He doesn't want to invest any money for more ram but he gets frustrated with it otherwise. I suggested 'wipe and reload' with Win 2000 Pro as its' memory requirements are half that of Win XP Pro and it is a good OS. I guess my question for the gurus here is does this make sense for him for the next 12-18 months? He said he will purchase a new system sometime late next year. All opinions are respected and appreciated. Loretta

Yes it makes senses. By all means go for it (W2K Pro) Most of the business still relies on this OS. i_XpUser

Thanks for the quick reply. He told me to go ahead with it if I thought it would help. I thought that at least he could have a couple of other applications open besides 'Net surfing and not take too much of a performance hit. I haven't done much computer repair/upgrade/troubleshooting since last fall and I have forgotten some things, so I come here and you guys always come through! Molti ringraziamenti come sempre! (many thanks)! Loretta

Win2K system requirements are slightly lower than WinXP, but 128MB memory is better suited for Win98SE or WinME. What about Linux?

Thanks for the reply. I thought that 2000 pro would be better suited for his needs and if and when I put in a newer cd burner or video card, 2000 pro would play nicer with some newer hardware. Plus, WinME is definitely out and he is not very computer savvy. Linux isn't even a consideration. Could be wrong though, thoughts? Loretta

I've installed WinME on numerous systems & have never had any more problems with it than any other M$ product. WinME got a bad rap right from the start & was never able to shake it off...oh well. Win2K will perform better with 128MB RAM than XP, but like 95/98/ME, 2K is no longer supported by M$.

Even with 128Meg and running on any of the other (earlier ) M$-OS... if he's into heavy download and play on-line - and using office utils at the same time - he's going to find things a little less than ideal... And to make it worse... the more current the office util the more demanding it is on system resources/RAM etc. With that in mind, RAM is pretty cheap these days; and a few $$$$/£££ spent on perhaps an upgrade of RAM levels would be worthwhile for the duration? Presumaby this Compaq is able to support at least 512Meg RAM - posibly at least 1Gig (if not more); and I'd encourage the upgrade - even if reverting to W2K.