some advice needed to considering to move my w2k machine into a freebsd workstation.

[Frank Jahnke]

I'd suggest leaving your Windows machine (and all the software you use)
in tact, and play with FreeBSD on the side until you are comfortable
enough with it to use it full time.  You may like it (most do), but you
may not.

There are two ways I would proceed.  One is to get a live FreeBSD CD
(Freesbie) and play around with it.  The other would be to make your
system dual-boot.  That is, you can select either FreeBSD or Windows at
boot time.  That way you can have the benefits of both environments
(though not at the same time). 

I'd recommend you buy a second hard drive -- 40 MB is fine to get going
-- and install FreeBSD on that.  Drives are cheap right now; I've seen
decent 40 GB drives for $30 or so.  Download the ISOs from FreeBSD.org
onto the new disk, and have at it!

You may find that you need to keep windows around, because as you
mention there are sites where you really need IE.  Otherwise, I find
there are no limitations on the FreeBSD desktop, though I'm not big into
multimedia.

FWIW, that's how I got started on FreeBSD -- an inexpensive secondary
disk on a PIII/dual boot.  I liked it well enough that when I put
together my dual Athlon workstation I used FreeBSD as the only OS.  I
like it.

Frank