That does look nice, thanks for the info. Are there any applications not compatible with it, or can you run absolutely everything?

these are the only problems i can think of:

compatability with old games. modern games all have support for win 2k but as it was designed as a business OS, support for games was not included. MS did release a compatability update which [theoretically] provided support for older games but i still didnt get many to work on 2k. That update is now included into the service packs.

XP does have nicer colour support. icons and things have better colour rendition in XP than 2k, but it's nothing u can't live with.

XP has UPnP, and 2k does't. UPnP is a system which basically lets things like MSN read your internet settings automatically and configure the program to work, sounds a big feature, but NONE of the connection related problems i had on XP are present now on 2k. I used to have issues sending and receiving files on mIRC and on MSN (yes, my router was all configured with correct port forwarding), and i had some funky problems with my contacts list on aMSN (i use aMSN, not microsoft MSN).

Since moving to 2k, as my router was already config'd with the correct ports, ALL files in, out, and my contacts list in aMSN work 100%. so much for UPnP.

All in all, if u can live with slightly less colour vividness, make the switch. I can't think of anything other than colour that XP beats 2k in.

Maybe someone can help with this, as I'm still experiencing this problem. Whenever I try to install vista, it just stops working towards the end. The drive formats fine, everything installs, restarts, hits another install step, then restarts to finalize the install. But whenever it does this, sometime after the post, the video output shuts off, and my monitor goes into standby, with the computer still running.

I know vista has problems with video drivers for ATI cards, but I was able to get Beta 2 running just fine on the second install of that. None of my hardware has changed, I'm installing it on the same partition, formatted because I didn't leave enough space to do an upgrade.

Any ideas what might be going on that RC1 isn't working where Beta 2 did?

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I downloaded this from microsoft. Did the upgrade advisor and all. My PC is about 2 months old, and has the vista compatible sticker on it. The only problem is that it hangs on the final stage of the install. I've tried it twice, with no luck. Any suggestions?