I'm afraid at this point any new purchases are not doable.
Will I notice any performance benefits from
1. Putting XP Home back on the Dell
2. Putting XP Pro back on the Toshiba
These were the original OS when new. When I inherited both they had bad drives. I fixed one & replaced the other. Both granters had lost the discs. I owned a retail copy of Win2K SP4 so installed on both. Both granters have found their disc so I could go back to the original OS if performance would be improved. I don't care about some of the other bells & whistles of XP.
What prompted this whole discussion is the realization that some software developers are dropping support for Win2K. If there's no performance gain I'll just wait it out and hopefully do as you said and move up to Win7 on a new machine.


John
ESI Gigaport HD+
Lenovo Turion II /4 Gig Ram/ Win7x64 be
15.6" Monitor
"The only Band is a Real Band"
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