Best OS for new machine

[SeattleRaider]

Will be putting together a new machine in the next month or so. What is the best OS. Is Win 2000 the most hassle free? I hear XP is a pain with all the activation crap. This system will be for home use including  but not limited to games.

[Josetann]

Have you considered Linux?  Even if you don\'t go 100%, you may like dual-booting between it and windows.  I\'m using primarily Mandrake 8.2, and whenever I need to do something in windows I either fire up win4lin (win98) or vmware (winxp)...both of which will run while I\'m still in Linux.

BTW Mandrake 9 is due to be out very soon.  They just released RC3 today.

[Space Between]

Yes he could\'nt be more true. I\'m now running win 2000 pro for ecoding video purpose\'s.

I have a multi boot system

w2kpro
redhat (linux)
seawolf (linux)
dos 6.22

I really don\'t use redhat all that much. I checked out a book once that described how to run seawolf, windows NT4 and dos in a multi boot. I pretty much stick with that.

Although seawolf is really over my head on alot of stuff...i preffer that over the other linux distributions for it was the first i used and feel more flexible with.

Redhat is probably the best \"user friendly/configurable\" compared to the rest of the distributions although that is extreemly arguable.

Right now im in w2k so i can encode some dvd material.

I could use vmware or other\'s to run it in Linux but i never have felt you can get the most performance out of encoding that way. Also i have never tried it with what tools i use now so i keep at what i got.

ms dos 6.22 is the only thing i really use for quick scripting/text editing.

What im trying to get across to you listing what i use is that it really depends on what you want to do. You want to play with code or figure the most you can out about a computer you would use linux/unix. If you want to run alot of multimedia it would be win2k.

It\'s all relative to what you got to get done. I mainly try to stick to linux...and i always due if im not doing multimedia or learning stuff about windows or trying to help.

I would\'nt however recommend using WinXP or WinME (obviously) for if you want help on those\'s it\'s either non-existant (WinME) or very close/identical (WinXP) to the help that exist today in a mass amount. WinXP\'s eula is really bad for my reasoning aswell.

win2kpro/linux/dos is what i stick with and probably will for a long time.

But that is relative aswell