A new Toshiba Portege 2000 is scheduled to arrive today, and when we
turn it on we will have to choose between Windows XP Pro and Windows
2000 Pro.

Simply tell me which operating system to choose and why, in your
opinion.

Hi, beckybob-ga:

Off the top of my head I'm going to go with Windows XP.

Reasoning:  The Toshiba Portege 2000 is probably the slimmest laptop
out there.  I have a bulkier Toshiba laptop myself, and I have Windows
XP Pro installed on it.

The first thing I noticed about Windows XP is how quickly it boots up,
relative to Windows 2000 (and NT before it).  Sure XP is newer, and
there is still some deficit of drivers written specifically for XP,
but so far I've had satisfactory results in finding a W2K driver that
still works with XP (even though it may not have been certified), e.g.
the Olympus Camedia driver (USB port) for my digital camera.

A related set of potential problems are with software packages that
conflict with XP.  Here I feel that enough time has passed for this
not to be a serious disadvantage.

One final potential concern is the "lock down" characteristics of Win
XP (along with Office XP) where the software gets keyed to your
hardware when you register it with Microsoft.  I think for a desktop,
where I might be tempted to go in and add drives, etc., this would be
a significant drawback.  But for a laptop, there's just not a lot of
opportunity or motivation to reconfigure the hardware in a major way. 
I don't know if you've maxed out the memory, but that should be a
simple enough add-on to do yourself.

I like XP.  I've had a few glitches with the custom screen drivers on
my Toshiba, but it's been minor.  At least on my Toshiba the variety
of "hibernation" and "low power" modes is a bit confusing, and
occasionally I've hit the power switch (thinking I was bringing it out
of low power mode, when in fact it was just the screen that had gone
dark; as a result the machine powers off and I lose my work!).  But
that's the machine design, nothing specific to XP or W2K.

If you do a lot of traveling, this should be a really great machine. 
It looks like the power consumption has really been optimized.  I
remember when you were lucky to get 45 minutes out of a laptop
battery!

best wishes, mathtalk-ga

Thanks for the speed. Your answer came just as UPS drove up. Bob