Windows 2000 vs WinXP?

[kriilin]

I will be moving from BeyondTV to Sage in the next few months. I will be moving my HTPC out of the living room, and using the HD extender. I will be using the pc for only the Sage Server app, and my h/w is of the AMD 3400+/DDR400 vintage. I want to do a clean build from scratch, and have both XP and W2K. Assuming my h/w has current W2K drivers, I was wondering if my build should be Windows 2000 or XP? Thanks.

[PGPfan]

Shouldn't make a big difference IF as you mention, the box is just used as a Sage server (assuming driver availability for capture cards). Win2k is a business designed OS, whereas XP is Win2k with multi-media features added (along with other things, but mostly media stuff to 'consumerize' it). At least that's how we viewed it when I was on the developement teams of both Win2k and XP.

-PGPfan

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by kriilin

I will be moving from BeyondTV to Sage in the next few months. I will be moving my HTPC out of the living room, and using the HD extender. I will be using the pc for only the Sage Server app, and my h/w is of the AMD 3400+/DDR400 vintage. I want to do a clean build from scratch, and have both XP and W2K. Assuming my h/w has current W2K drivers, I was wondering if my build should be Windows 2000 or XP? Thanks.

I know that most of the capture cards I have used for my Sage servers, required Windows XP SP2 in order to work. You may not have these limitations on your capture cards, but to avoid any future headaches (and possible reloading of the OS), I would highly recommend XP over W2k.

[Paul H]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

I know that most of the capture cards I have used for my Sage servers, required Windows XP SP2 in order to work. You may not have these limitations on your capture cards, but to avoid any future headaches (and possible reloading of the OS), I would highly recommend XP over W2k.

I agree, I've found XP SP2 to be more stable and offers better options than W2K.

[kriilin]

Thanks guys, that's kinda what I thought. I was thinking that W2K would be lighter weight, it seems every new OS adds more crap. I was considering Linux, but don't want to limit my options with h/w.

[Grasshopper]

Win2K might be slightly lower overhead, but the difference between it and XP isn't huge and your hardware will hardly notice the difference. With XP you have the advantages of better driver support for your capture cards and more current support and patches from MS (perhaps).

Or you could go Windows Home Server. I like it so much that I bought it even though I had a spare copy of XP I could've used at zero cost.

[kriilin]

So Windows Home Server support is built into the standard SageTV for Windows 6.3?

[Grasshopper]

In the download section, there's a separate version of Sage specifically for WHS. But it's covered by the same license agreement. It installs as a plugin for WHS and gives you a tab on the console to stop and start the service and also to enter licenses for extenders and whatnot.

[davephan]

To prevent stuttering, you should store your videos on 64K block size drives.

You should choose Windows XP Pro if you want to degrag 64k block size drive (I don't know if Windows XP Home can defrag 64k block drives).

You can format drives for 64K block size with Windows 2000, but you can't ever defrag them due to the limitations of Windows 2000. Microsoft does not support Windows 2000 anymore, except for perhaps very critical patches - that alone is a good reason to choose XP instead of 2000.


Dave

[kriilin]

Did not know about the 64K block size defrag limitation in W2K, thanks!

[thestig]

Since you are building a headless server I would use W2K. I don't see any reason to defrag the recording filesystem. Just do it in the OS filesystem which should be 4K.