newsbin.com

Anyone have any opinion as to whether to use WinXP or Win2K under vmware?
I've set up instances of each under the vmware player (the player's free, BTW) and Win2K appears to be more responsive, so I think I'm going to go with that, but I thought I'd see if anyone knew of "gotchas" before I invested the time.
Thanks!
Bob

PS: if you download the evaluation copy of vmware workstation and "expand" it using

Code: Links not allowed for unregistered users

start /b /wait VMware-workstation-XXXXXXX.exe /a /s /v"/qn TARGETDIR=C:\VMware"


(note - I did this in windows, also note that the XXes are version numbers - just match to whichever version of wkstn you get), you can then use the "windows.iso" file as a virtual CD, and install vmware tools, which will give you decent windows device drivers.

Unless you have a reason otherwise, run XP. It runs just fine in vmware. Any difference in performance would probably be more or less the same as the performance of the OS's running natively. If that's important to you, and you really don't care about what XP brings to the party(which IMHO is a fair bit), then perhaps you should run Win2K, but otherwise I'd go XP.

DT

I'd expect better performance from '2k. Lower memory usage too. I like them both though.

The memory and disk footprint for W2K is smaller, and this might matter to you when running under VMWare depending on the resources you can dedicate to VMWare. However if you have a sufficiently powerful host with plenty of memory, then it probably does not matter which you choose. You should then base your decision on what uses (other than newsbin) you want from the VM. IE7 as an example would require XP as it would not run under W2K.

DThor wrote:what XP brings to the party(which IMHO is a fair bit)

Hmmm...
The major improvements that I ran into when moving from w2k to wxp were
- better wireless support (still screwed up after a suspend, though)
- ability to run with reduced credentials (a BIG deal for me when running win natively)
- slightly more efficient networking stack
Other than the improved stack, what else might I care about?

Less likely to find problems running recent software, is my first thought.

DT

yeah i would run with xp also. worked fine for me.