I've been running Windows 2000 Professional since beta 3 in 1999. The only time that I've touched Windows XP was a brief play with an 64-bit beta a few months ago. It's just never been that enticing.
Reasons to upgrade:
- prettier
- better software support (eg. Windows Media Player 10 is only available for XP)
- better security updates (eg. see problems with KB885835 and KB835732)
- the Wikipedia's list
Reasons not to upgrade:
- costs money
- uses more memory
- doesn't offer substantial improvements, as seen by the following table
Marketing name Internal name Release date NT 4 NT 4 1996 2000 NT 5 2000 XP NT 5.1 2001
Well, the price finally dropped far enough for me to overcome my pecuniary objections, so I bought it a few days ago. I was going to do a fresh installation (as recommended by most people on the net), but at the last moment switched to doing an upgrade just to see how well it would go. To my surprise, it went very well. When the system came up in XP for the first time, my desktop was just as I had left it. All of my programs appeared to work properly, and it seemed to be all systems go.
After a few days of use my summary of its use is:
Positives:
- Boot time went from 2 minutes to 28 seconds (including POST), and restarting from hibernation from 35 seconds to 20 seconds).
- Most software looks much nicer. Even flashier widgets in Firefox make a difference.
Negatives:
- The Battle for Middle-Earth thought it was now a pirated copy, and insisted of killing armies for no reason in the middle of games. This was solved by reinstalling it.
- The flashy XP theme is barely configurable at all, with just three colour schemes, and no setting of specific colours.
- RAM usage has increased somewhat
- Sharing folders on Windows XP box with a Windows 98 PC broke. After some investigation I found out about a new security setting in XP that was not in Windows 2000. By default, accounts with blank passwords can't access file shares. The symptoms of this on the Win 98 box include a myriad of "access denied", "share not found", and "unknown error 31" messages. This can be easily remedied with the group policy editor (if you don't want to set a password).
So, if you can get Windows XP cheap enough, then there's enough of a benefit over Windows 2000 to make upgrading worthwhile.