MYSTical_Achenar

The cosmetic features that you told people to turn off will improve performance, but there are factors that could improve performance much more, such as the chipset on your video card and how much RAM it has onboard, the revision of the BIOS on your motherboard, the age and stability of certain drivers, and perhaps most apparent, having more than one device on the hard drive's IDE chain (if you use IDE for your HDD). If you have a CD-ROM drive or something hooked up as a slave to the HDD, expect noticeably slower performance than if the hard drive is the only device. Also, SDRAM is relatively cheap now, and 2000 loves RAM even more than NT did, so don't go slim with the RAM. :-) The 820 chipset and RDRAM do make 2000 much snappier, but RDRAM is EXPENSIVE! over $300 for 128MB.

I don't know why your computers are slow in booting, guys. I have a P3-450, 128MB on an ASUS P2B board and I just added a network card yesterday. I noticed no slowdown in booting except the first time I booted with the card in. I attributed that to loading drivers for the card and configuring it (no driver disk needed!! that was awesome...us NT enthusiasts aren't used to that.) Bear in mind that Windows 2000 and NT were never meant to boot faster than 98. My personal opinion is that it isn't really possible, and at the same time, I don't really care if it takes longer to boot than 98 simply because of how much better it is. :-) If it really is an issue, I'd just log off when you're done using it rather than shutting it down. If anyone complains to you about the electricity it's using, tell them that all the alarm clocks and crap that are running 24/7 in the building add up to more juice than one computer (with the monitor and whatever laser printer you have off, of course).