Bill D

We're down to Win 2000 on one machine and WinXP on another (and on a laptop) just through mechanical attrition. (We still have Win98 on an old "guest" machine.) The things do wear out.

We do like the stability on both a lot better than the older versions, although we didn't have a lot of problems with the older ones - simply by not using much other than commercial "work grade" programs.

On the whole, XP is probably a better choice than 2K for most typical users. although it's hard to be to "definitive" about how you come to that conclusion. Win 2K very much "wants to be" part of an "enterprise network," since quite a few "little detail" things come only with the server packages - which most of us don't want to mess with.

There is also the confusion of the "Home" and "Professional" versions of XP - and of the various Office Suites. Microsoft has not done a good job of letting people know what they're getting there, and to use the technical term - "Works SUCKS." Quite a few people who've expressed unfavorable opinions about XP to me are really talking about problems with "tiny-toy-Works," which is missing lots of the "goodies." Later versions are better, but still not the real thing.

On the sound card thing - everyone seems to be putting 3 speaker connectors and the digital (videocam) connectors on their soundcards, which leaves no room for a midi connector. Soundblaster's newest "standard" adds a front panel "connector plate" to give you the "missing" connectors - midi, mic, volume knob, and a firewire port. The problem is that with the proliferation of "dual optical drives," - a CD-ROM and a DVD/CDR/W or some such combination, many people won't have a front panel 5.25 bay available to install it. (And Soundblaster's web site specs only vaguely tell you you need one.)

With "hindsight in front of me" I'd have considered omitting the DVD-ROM on my new machine to leave room for something like the SoundBlaster Audigy 2 front panel hookups. Old USB wasn't fast enough for good external optical drives, but the new machines mostly have USB-2.1 ports (and usually at least 4 to 6 of them) and at least one firewire port, any of which are fast enough to use with remote CD-R/W or even DVD-R/W.

I can see a proliferation of little boxes stacked around our machines - remote drives and interfaces - until we give up and go back to full $ize tower ca$e$. Fortunately (he says, grudgingly) the little boxes are beginning to appear on the market.

John