Tim,
We migrated our application to Win 2K initially under labVIEW 4.x without problem. Of course, Win 2K, is slower starting up, but throw some memory at it and it's performance is not significantly different than NT. Although... I wouldn't recommend putting Win 2K on a 200MHz PII. Our legacy clients generally have to upgrade their computers when they upgrade their software. Current hardware cost (motherboard, cpu, memory, hard drives, etc.) are pretty insignificant anyway...
If your clients have legacy ISA DAQ boards, you can still find ISA support from most of the major motherboard manufactures; infact, Soyo has a top of the line P4 board with 3 ISA slots.
The move to Windows XP required us to migrate to labVIEW 6i which caused some issues. But if
your already using labVIEW version 5.x there really aren't any significant differences. Our labVIEW 6i app. seems to run fine on any of the three OS's NT4.0, Win 2K, and Win XP. Windows NT is marginally faster, but once the OS is up and running, I've not seen much difference between any of them -- admittedly, I've never really stress tested any of them either, and our app. is the only executable running. Certain portions of it require CPU intensive tasks (actually, IO intensive task), but we have not seen significant differences between the OS's.
Given the choice, we choose to use 2K over XP because it is more mature, and most of our client have only recently completed migration to 2K on their other computers. As yet, we have not been asked to use XP, but we have not seen nor expect problems if our clients choose to upgrade to XP.
That's our experience...
kind regards,
Eric
PS: people are starting to ask about Linux, but that is a whole other alternative which I cannot
, as yet, address...
