JDN: Whoa there. Saying "All I'm going to do is email, surfing and video stuff" is like saying "All I'm going to eat for lunch is a bowl of soup, a cup of coffee, and a 14-foot-long hoagie." 'Video stuff' covers a lot of territory, and most of it requires that you have a very, very beefy computer: lots of memory, LOTS of disk, lots of CPU cycles, a firewire connection, a big monitor, and possibly a bunch of other equipment. You'd have to be more specific, but editing video is just about the only consumer application that can beggar any personal computer for resources.
But whatever you mean by video stuff, Windows 2000 is probably the best operating system to handle it. I edit video on a 2-processor W2k machine. All the better video editing programs (not including Windows Movie Maker) will use two processors if you've got 'em running under an operating system that supports them. Windows 2000 Professional (the desktop version of W2k) supports mulitple processors. Windows 98 and ME don't. From what I hear, Microsoft intends to deliberately cripple the home version of Windows XP so that it won't either, even though it's the same basic system as Windows 2000.
When in doubt, if you're not into heavy video gaming, Windows 2000 is the way to go. (Solaris doesn't make any sense at all for a casual home user. Unfortunately neither does Linux.)
--QS |
