Fransexy: I had installed windows98 then upgrade to xp, xp was so slow on my machine that i have to install windows 2000, so no, i not notice an huge improvement in performance with XP is quite the opossite.
Sorry, man, but I do those kinds of upgrades all the time. XP is quite a bit faster, overall, provided you use the classic interface.
I've never done a 98 to XP upgrade, though. I always do clean installs. It wouldn't surprise me at all if an upgrade turns the machine into sludge.
BootWB: A lot of this is down to the fact that the hard drive will only run at PI0 mode even though it is capable of UDMA4 (and yes, I have enabled DMA in both BIOS and device manager - I also tried deleting and reinstalling the primary IDE bus - no effect).
Is this an nForce-based motherboard? nVidia has their own ATA driver which may help. There are also known problems between Maxtor drives and nVidia chipsets.
BootWB: So I'm still weighing up W2K - WXP? Which is less annoying?
The main reason I've avoided XP (besides the issues changing hardware configurations), is that I hate those stupid pop-up balloons.
Also, Microsoft changed almost
everything regarding network settings -- for worse. I despise the new wizards. Win2K is much, much easier to set up with regard to networking. Then again, Windows networking was always braindead to begin with. ;-)
Think I'll stick with 2k until something requires I upgrade.
I hope you've archived all the Win2K tools that you've gotten from Microsoft over the years. They're no longer available for download. I tried to get ACT 3.0 to help someone make a compatibility patch for 2K, only to find out it has been completely replaced by ACT 4.1, which will not run at all on Win2K.
Microsoft supports their products for 6 years. While that's longer than most companies will support their products (*cough* Apple *cough*), now that Win2K is out of its support life, you may want to update. XP is also a "consumer" product, rather than the workstation product that is Win2K, so it'll likely be supported for a very, very long time.