WinXP Home Help Needed For Newly Built System

[R-J]

Hi,

I was wonderiing if any of you could help me ?

I have just built the following system for the purpose of storing and editing family videos and photographs, creating music and for playing offline games :

Athlon 64 FX-53
ATI Radeon x800 Pro
2GB Ram
Soundblaster Audigy 2 Platinum
2x200GB hard drives

I have already downloaded and updated the latest BIOS for the motherboard, and I have downloaded all of the latest drivers for all of the hardware in preparation for installation, however, I do have some questions before I proceed :

1) I will be installing Windows XP Home on to the system and as I dont intend to have any internet, printer or network capabilities (I have a another system for such tasks) which services and other features can be disabled to give maximum performance and maximum stability ?

2) Would the "basic" Windows XP Home install suffice for such a system or is Service Pack 1/2 essential ? and if so, which would you recommend installing ?

3) Would a dual booting machine be recommended ? (ie, one for videos, photographs and music and the other for games)

4) Are there any other hints, tips or tricks I should know to help the system work at maximum performance ?

Any help and information would be greatly appreciated.

[pip22]

Let's get SP1 out of the way first to simplify things. SP2 includes ALL the updates that were in SP1 plus a whole load more, so you only need to consider whether or not to install SP2 'cos no-one needs both.

If this 'puter is never going to be connected to the net, then all the security updates in SP2 are somewhat pointless and it does consume almost a gigabyte of hard-disk space (I know cos I've installed it on my PC).

And despite XP being very relatively rock-solid and stable, the fact still remains that the more software you add to it (for example, adding SP2) the more chances there are of having software-related problems.

I would not complicate things by having a dual-boot setup, but by all means safeguard against losing your own files by having a second partition on the boot disk to keep backups, or better still a second physical disk in case the boot disk packs up, trashing not only Windows but your precious files aswell. So a second disk is highly recommended. You can re-install Windows, but if you lose your own work aswell you've lost it for good.

[R-J]

Thank you for your reply and for the information.

In reference to Service Pack 2, are there any other updates that are needed by or are essential to Windows XP`s operation and stability ? If not i do not think that I will install Service Pack 2 as it will never be connected to the internet or a network, and as you say many of the patches and updates would be pointless to the system and eat up the hard drive space.

I will be attaching one of the hard drives to a removeable hard drive bay, that way I can move the hard drive to my other system then burn all of my files directly to dvd for safety. I learnt the hard way that it is best to keep an up to date back up of all files that can not be replaced.

once again, thank you for your reply and for the information.