Games on Windows 2000 Pro?

[Robin997]

hi ya

i have just picked up a copy of windows 2000 professional, but i have heared you cannot play games on this version of windows, or do you need sp4 to play games.

any helpful posts welcome.

 

[caravel]

You need SP4 full stop, do not connect to the net without SP4 installed.

As for games you can run pretty much any game on 2K that runs on XP AFAIK. The best thing is to look at the system requirements for the game first. What games are you trying to run?

 

[Robin997]

The PC will be used for my older games, quite a few golf games like tiger woods 2000, 2003, far cry etc+ , it's just that i remember my friend saying that you could not run games on 2000 professional. I don't know if this is the case if you have sp4 though?

My pc is pleanty capable of playing those games though.

 

[caravel]

The PC will be used for my older games, quite a few golf games like tiger woods 2000, 2003, far cry etc+ , it's just that i remember my friend saying that you could not run games on 2000 professional. I don't know if this is the case if you have sp4 though?

My pc is pleanty capable of playing those games though.

You will have to check the system requirements for the game. This is on the back of the game box. Most games will run on WinXP/2K there are a few old games that won't and quite a few new games and programs that won't run on Win9x.

Regarding SP4, it's necessary, not to get games running but for security and stability reasons. Basically when you install Win2k have SP4 already downloaded and ready on another disk. As soon as you're logged in, install SP4 before you do anything else. Then install your Video, sound, network, etc drivers, run Windows update, get DirectX 9.0c and you should be good to go.

 

[Robin997]

Thaks for the help, a while ago my friend said that the "professional" version of windows 2000 was not desiged for games to be installed and would not allow any pc games to be installed. Probably because it was not intended as a "gaming OS", but more for a work related operating system.

 

[caravel]

I'd advise you to ignore your friend. Win2k only comes in the Professional, Server and Advanced Server versions (there may be some more server ones that I've forgotten) and like XP Professional it runs games. Win2K never had a "Home" (crippled) version like XP. XP is pretty much the same thing as 2K. XP is really Windows NT 5.1 and 2K is really Windows NT 5.0. The one is in essence a more up to date version of the other. Most drivers and programs for 2K work on XP which is why when you download a driver you will see them referred to as "XP/2K drivers". There are a few odd programs and devices that run on XP that won't run on 2k but mostly that's M$ programs such as the latest media players, messengers and IE7. It's a way of "inciting" the user to upgrade. The games you've mentioned should run.

 

[Robin997]

thanks for the advice caravel, by the way i noticed you have the same graphics card as me. I have just bought one for £60 but not got round to using it yet. What do you think of the graphics card?

 

[caravel]

It's not a bad card, I wouldn't shout about it, especially not the 2D image quality, but for the money (I paid around £40) it does it's job. I mainly run it on Linux anyway and it works great with Doom4/Quake4. Windows is a different story, I'm getting the infamous infinite loop bug and virtually nothing will run that uses Direct3D without crashing almost immediately. This is partially down to my (old) hardware though, motherboard in particular, and won't manifest itself on most newer systems.