[Omega]

For me, gaming performance is secondary to stability. Windows 98 crashes probably >5x more than Windows 2000 Professional, and Windows XP Professional is about on par with Windows 2000. Granted, a bit of this has to do with what programs are installed, running, and how the computer is used, but in general, Windows 98 sucks for that.

Unfortunately, Windows 98 still has the edge on gaming performance. Although, from what I've heard, my performance gain when moving from Windows 98SE to Windows 2000 Professional is abnormal, usually the performance losses should be minimal.

Windows XP Professional has similar, but slightly better gaming performance than Windows 2000, and assuming the Luna GUI is disabled, similar OS performance.

Savage: I don't think there's any reasonable explanation for how long it was taking you to boot Windows 2000, but that's definately abnormal (unless you were booting Windows 2000 Advanced Server, which likely had several services to begin). I would check to make sure all your hard drive, and IDE settings and drivers were correct.