My review

We shall see, bloated OS that it is.

Yes and No. Certainly, winxp pro takes a bit more HD space, but it's quite speedy in bootup, in fact much faster than win2kpro, almost as fast as win98.

Functionality-wise, I haven't tested all the nooks and crannies, in terms of the new features such as song-ripping, and cd-burning. But I do like the build-in rudimentary firewall and automatic clock updating via internet.

Furthermore, XP pro does appear to be more win9x app friendly, a case in point: I couldn't install my need for speed 4, high stakes under win2k unless going through some major painstaking manual modification, but there's no such headache under WinXP.

What you hear about XP needing more resources is indeed true, though I'm not sure if it's due to the immaturity of various device drivers or the OS's fundamentals. Example: I usually achieve around 28fp with UTbench under win2k pro, now it's down to 24. I'm yet to test the comparative performance with 3Dsmax 4 and maya 4.

So far I've come across only one app that runs under win2k fine but fails in winxp: neoragex. All other apps/games that run under w2k work equally well under winxp.


Stability-wise, WinXP is on-par with Win2k Pro, like the latter, almost all known instance of crashes can be solely attributed to IE6, a historically crash-prone app for some reason. Somewhat disappointingly, the hibernation function appears to be even less functional than that of win2k.

Now, the million dollar question: would I pay to upgrade from my current win2k to winxp? Probably not. But I do see it as a worthy investment if you're still using win98, probably even winME.