Of Topic - couple OS questions..

One...

Is WindowsXP really as "good" as I've heard it is? Is it worth the money and my while? Would it help with modern game performance?

Two
What is Linux? I've never known anyone personally who's had it and so I've never seen it or heard much about it...

Three
How do you install two OS's on one HD and switch between the two? Is it safe? Will it destablize my system? Reason for this is I do not at the moment have a "doom machine" and I would still like to run all my doom games etc and well, XP wont allow that...

1. Dumb question

2. Dumb question

3. Dumb question

Se7enDeadlySins said:
One...

Is WindowsXP really as "good" as I've heard it is? Is it worth the money and my while? Would it help with modern game performance?

People like to think 2K is faster than XP but in truth they're roughly dead even, and XP has DOS Emulation and many more user-friendly features.

Keep in mind it is strictly Windows, so Windows based games are definitely better. In my personal experience my framerates in ZDoom went down a bit but my framerates in Q3A skyrocketed and my loading times between levels in SoF are about 1/5th of what they used to be, although I bet that has something to do with NTFS owning FAT32.

Two
What is Linux? I've never known anyone personally who's had it and so I've never seen it or heard much about it...

Linux is an open sourced operating system. It's completely free, download it and try it if you're not put off by the amount you'd have to download, in which case, you can buy a prepackaged distribution (or 'distro' as TuxHeads call it).

Linux is a very capable and above all else flexible operating system, however, it is not very simple to use. Unlike Windows or Mac you can't just 'dive in' and figure shit out as you go along. If you really want to get good with it I'd strongly suggest you have someone there with you who is already into it or have two computers, one to experiment on and learn with and the other to ensure contact with the Linux community in case something goes sour.

Three
How do you install two OS's on one HD and switch between the two? Is it safe? Will it destablize my system? Reason for this is I do not at the moment have a "doom machine" and I would still like to run all my doom games etc and well, XP wont allow that...

Install Windows first. Then when you install your second OS it will usually install it's own boot selector. XP has it's own but it's not as user friendly as some of the ones that are geared towards Linux newbies.

Of course, LILO fucked me in the ear with a battleship so I'm biased very, very far away from Linux. I hope you have better luck than I did.

Doom runs on XP, but it's emulated so it's nowhere near as fast. PRBoom, on the other hand, runs like a dream and when configured can be just about exactly like the original executables. I use it to watch speedruns. =)

Hell if it's that important to you it's probably possible to configure a dual boot between XP and MS-DOS, which was something I was considering for a while.

You can install Linux on the same system as Windows and they'll be completely separate. You won't have anything to worry about so long as your boot manager stays intact, so stay the hell away from LILO.

Also, if you don't know what Linux is, stay well clear. It isn't user unfriendly, it's just very picky about who it's friends with. :P

Personally I prefer windows 2K, it does nearly everything XP does with less memory abuse

Thanks for the info...much appriciated =) It's helped alot.