The following details will be useful in determining the best course of action:
1. Processor and Memory
2. Hard Disk Partitions - Format, Sizes and Free space of each partition.
Before going into the process, a couple of points -
A. Win2k is, by nature, more stable than Win9x or WinME. IMHO, there are 2 possible reasons why your computer is crashing frequently - one is that your system is possibly not powerful enough to run Win2k, in which case you should go for Win98 or WinME; For ex, I am running Win2k on a system with Celeron 633 MHz processor and 128MB RAM. It performs reasonably well, though they run a bit slow with memory intensive programs. I would probably say that this is a borderline system for running Win2k successfully. The other is that there may be installation errors, registry errors, defragmentation problems due to a few years of use without using system maintenance tools. In this case, I would advise you to do a complete system maintenance (run disk defragmenter, and registry check software such as jV16 power tools), correct all problems, and then try to run the system for a few days. If you still have problems, go for a switch
B. Many people consider WinME to be the worst OS that MS brought out. I have never used it, so I cannot comment on it. If u have used it and are satisfied with it, go for it; otherwise, I would recomment Win98 instead...
C. Whether you format the data or not, when you change your OS, it is always advisable to take a backup of all your important data. Even when you are not changing data, it is advisable to take backups at regular intervals; since you never know when your HDD is gonna crash on you...
D. If you are low on HDD space, seriously consider purchasing a second HD. If not, you should move your music files into the other partitions. You can set the computer to run this process over night. One piece of advise is to keep your music and movie files in a different partition than your system partition. Reason is that as you add more of these, they tend to fragment your system rapidly and lower performance considerably. Since pretty much all applications do need system calls, when system partition is highly fragmented, all applications will slow down.
There is no straightforward way to remove Win2k and install WinME on your system without formatting that partition. TRY THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK (may be after others more knowledgable than me have certified this). First, make sure your system partition is FAT32. If it is NTFS, use Partition Magic to convert from NTFS to FAT32 (requires 10% free space for successful operation). Boot into Linux and remove Win2k system files and folders (WINNT, Documents and Settings, boot.ini, etc). Then, make GRUB your default Boot Manager and remove Win2k entry. Then, restart your computer, reboot with your Win ME CD and install WinME on the system partition. If you dont get Linux booting option after this, download a third-party boot manager for Windows such as the free XOSL and enter Linux and reset to GRUB.
Will this work or not??? I am not sure... I doubt if you can find solution on the net.... Only choice? BACKUP and test it...
Arun
