WINDOWS 2000 IS THE ONLY WAY TO GO!!!

On my way down to San Jose, I temporarily installed my sister's Pentium 233MMX in my car to play mp3's.  I loaded windows 98 on a few spare 1 gig hard drives I had laying around.  It worked great until we had to stop for gas and food.  Windows 98 does not like to be shut off improperly, a few times is fine but not all the time!!  I also learned that ANY FAT system doesn't like the bumps on the road, I was starting to have problems half way down Oregon and it finally died near California.  I loaded the computer with Windows NT for the trip back home and I did not run into any problems at all.  That is when I decided to load it with Windows 2000!  The Hibernation feature cuts down the start up time in half.  What it does is copy all the ram onto the hard drive when it shuts down so that when you turn on the computer again, all it does is load the file back into the ram and it's back to where it was.  That feature along with the more robust NTFS file system persuaded me into loading Windows 2000.  If you're using anything less than a 300mhz machine, consider using Windows NT 4.0.  It doesn't have the Hibernation feature but it's not going to crash on you like windows 98 will.

There's a couple of modifications that you must do to the operating system

If you plan to just play MP3's, you should change the shell=explorer.exe line in the system.ini to shell=c:\progra~1\winamp\winamp.exe, under NT4, the line is under the winlogon key in the registry.

hkey_local_machine\software\microsoft\windows nt\winlogon

Just double-click on shell and change the value from explorer to c:\progra~1\winamp\winamp.exe

If you plan on running Windows NT, you should turn on the autoadmin login

Go back to the winlogon registry key hkey_local_machine\software\microsoft\windows nt\winlogon

Add the following string value: AutoAdminLogon give it a value of 1

For more help about the AutoAdminLogon, please consult the microsoft technet site, that's all I can remember.

I've opted to use the explorer shell because I'm running things other than Winamp.  I've just placed Winamp in my startup menu.

Other software includes:

Winamp of course

Cyberlink PowerDVD to play my DVD discs and music CD's

Lolo Macro Magic so I can put windows into hibernation by hitting the scroll lock key

Microsoft Streets and Trips 2001 for my GPS system, it's the only one one with Canadian street maps, a few gripes though, it doesn't give you verbal directions, it updates your position every 15 seconds and it doesn't rotate the map to correspond with the direction that you're going.