The How-To Library

Switching to Another Operating System

Question:
I'm now on Windows 98 and I'm thinking about switching to another OS. Would you recommend to stay on Windows 98 or to switch to another OS? If your recommendation is Windows XP, which one is better for a translator - Windows XP Professional or   Windows XP Home Edition?
My system:
Intel Celeron 400 MHz 256 MB RAM

Answer:
First of all, yes you should upgrade! If for a single reason, let it be stability. Being able to work several days without rebooting once or crashing and loosing precious work is a must (along with daily backup of your work data + email if you're to get real peace of mind).

Given the hardware you have, I suggest you upgrade to Windows 2000. Running Windows XP on our machine could be quite slow. And even with quite old hardware, you'll still be able to find drivers for Windows 2000.

Your PC will get almost as stable as under Windows XP, and definitely a lot safer than Windows 98!

One more thing to know: Windows 98 updates are not released anymore, and even Windows ME is to be abandoned by the end of 2003. At the end of this year, the only Microsoft OS which will get regular security patches through online Windows Update are Windows 2000, Windows 2000 Server (all versions), Windows XP Home and Pro versions, and Windows Server 2003 (the upcoming "Windows XP server").

After some research, it seems that your main board should be able to handle new Celeron processors. If you can afford a small hardware upgrade (a 1 to 2 GHz CPU would be a lot nicer for Windows XP), go for Windows XP Pro, you'll get some nice features that could save your life in a work environment such as: remote desktop, encrypted file system, multi-language packs (just great for a translator, you can switch your UI language easily), and, above all, Automated System Recovery in case you get a serious crash.

You can check your hardware compatibility with Windows XP at: www.microsoft.com/hwdq/hcl/search.asp

Also, both Windows 2000 and Windows XP have full support for Eastern/Asian languages. No more trouble with Cyrillic when you receive/send documents!

In case of a crash, a few simple things prepared in advance can make the difference between being stuck with you dead computer or be able to get back to work in less than 15 min with all your data and email at hand. One or two freeware utilities and smart PC setup get you real close to those very costly crash tolerant servers.

Question:
Will the new OS support some older DOS software?

Answer:
It's actually only a problem with DOS games or "prehistoric" applications.

As far as work goes, any decent desktop or business application will run fine under Windows 2000. There is a small application available at www.microsoft.com which basically gives Windows 2000 a very nice ability also available under Windows XP: that is emulate an old OS. You can fool the "old" application and pretend (only for this very application) that it's running under Win 95, 98 or ME (or Win NT4).

Question:
What about the compatibility between newer ATA 100/133Mhz hard drive with an older and slower ATA drives if they work together? They appear to work at the beginnig, but under load you get write errors to the disc that may corrupt it. This happened with Win98, 2K and ME.

Answer:
The solution is to connect the old drive to a different controller. Many recent motherboards have an additional ATA RAID controller that will handle the new drive just fine without any problem. Alternatively, you can buy an extra PCI ATA controller and connect the old drive to this controller.

Another solution is to keep your old hard drive, which is quite low capacity, in a safe place, with only a "minimum system install" (that is the OS, your Internet access and any application you need for your work in case of emergency). It will allow you to be back to work in no time in case of a serious hard disk crash with the new one. A couple of extra gigabytes will not be a real plus with a recent hard drive, but it will surely help to have this spare drive if things go wrong.

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