Thinkpads Forum

So, my 30gb hard drive has arrived. I keep it tucked away for a couple of says waiting for the USB enclosure to appear, it arrives today. So i hook it up to the USB and i find the drive hasnt been formatted, it still has an operating system on it! so i take the plunge, hope the darn thing boots, which it does! low and behold im now the happy owner of a fresh install of XP professional! Ive messed around with the thing for a bit, putting in antivirus etc, still runs at win 2k speed at the moment.

The plan is to leave it a few weeks, see how XP slows as registry fills up and programs clog it up. If it slows considerably Ill end up reverting back to W2K and clone my HD to the 30GB new one.

to sum up, not bad for a 25 quid ebay purchase!

by the way, does anyone know the advantages of running windows 2000 over XP which I might be missing? (dont want to wipe the old HD and then realise it was a mistake lol!)

cheers!

For me the System Restore Point makes XP preferable to 2K, because it lets me revert to the pre-install state if I install something I end up not liking.

One thing you should do is to invest in some kind of imaging software and image your new drive before you fill it up, since you don't have the original XP install disk. Burn the image to a CD or DVD so you can restore it if you have to do a reinstall for any reason. I recommend Acronis TrueImage, but there are free tools available.

if you had win2k do you remember the restore wizard ?
have to backup manually but gives you a restore point to go back to.
i started with win2k on my 600 and then XP,,what a slug,went back to win2k..lots faster...300mhz,,224meg ram.
other things,,is the xp pirated ? can you update it ?? if you have to re-activate it can you ?
no such thing as a free meal...or free XP....

Ive been running XP pro for a week or so now, and during htis i used acronic image (great peice of software by the way!) to make a disk image of the OS over my wireless network to my desktop. Since then i have been tweaking XP for maX performance, and in many respects it is faster than Win 2K (especially boot and shutdown time!) and my wireless card works FAR better with XP, win 2k got really confused about wireless, requiring the installation of a resource sucking piece of junk (linksys config utility) compatability with programs has improved, I get a nice "XP look". Also the fan only spins suring video or music playback (even then only after an hour or so) which was CONSTANTLY running on win 2K.

The HD the XP was on was a completly fresh, and it has been updated to service pack 2 and yes, i can even access windows updates! so yes this is a pirate but then so was my win 2K os (came with thinkpad, now in a USB enclosure for file transfer and in case of requiring Win 2k for office (which i need less and less with open office installed)).

im running a 366MHZ with ~300MB ram and XP runs great! even faster than my cluttered family desktop with a PIII 2.36MHZ processor!

so yes im lucky but im prepared for every eventuality (apart from MSoft reading this post and throwing me in prison )

but you just promoted their operating system.
surely then they ought to pay the bail then,no?