My desktop will be installing Windows 2000 Pro, should i convert the harddisk to NTFS? Currently it is FAT32.

My desktop will be LAN with my laptop which is using Windows ME on FAT32. Will the two of them able to transfer files if the file system are different?

My suggestion is,
if you will NOT be using the security features of NTFS just leave it to FAT 32

Personally id suggest NTFS as the file system, it doesnt matter if they are different over a network as the files are transferred in packets over the LAN adapter.

NTFS offers far superior performance on Windows 2000 and better file management.

You can also secure your files on the Win2k box and add a user to allow your laptop to access the desktop machine and in effect "log" onto the network.

Hope this helps

Aloha

switched to ntfs and very glad I finally did
every one else said nah dont bother
but now that I have a bit better performance
and I am using some security features
so go for it or keep a small partition as fat32 so you cna drag files over to the fat32 partition incase ya need to do that on the network I did this for a bit untill I was done with another puter running 98

Honu, im wondering why you had the fat partition over the network so you could copy files, as you can copy:

NTFS > FAT
FAT > NTFS

over the network, it doesnt matter about the file systems.

did I misunderstand your description Honu?

PS: it only matters if the two operating systems are installed on the one machine where a network is not involved, maybe this is what you were trying to say (dual boot system)

yeah
it was kinda dual boot thing wher I would throw in a swapable HD and that way I could get some files off
I use 2 comuters here so until the other one was to win2k had some probs getting back and forth was kind of a odd workaround but it worked
basically allowed me to have all my work files on one HD and OS on the other so when I went back to win 98 I was stuck
hope that makes better sense of it ??

man now I am confused
hehehhheehe

All I know is everything seems a lot happier since I switched to Win2K Pro with NTFS :D