All Hail Microsoft! (Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional)

Member Name: Herc2ules

Product:	Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional
Date:	17/06/00 (153 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Looks familiar and crashes less

Disadvantages: Sometimes overally helpful

With utter dread I opened the Windows 2000 Professional disk. NT4 had (again) blue screened on me and now seemed as good a time as any to load Microsofts newest operating system.

That was March 2000. Now several months later its time to reveal the truth (cue creepy music).

Now I think its only fair to talk about Windows 2000 in the broadest possible terms because I am assuming the level of understanding from people who use this website will be varied. So at the end I'm going to talk a little technical (but not too much cause I hate jargon).

Simply put, Windows 2000 provides the best aspects from Windows 98 and NT4 with some little extra's. After using it now for a few months I'm happy to report that it's pretty good. On first look it resembles all Windows operating systems and you average ever day user might not notice too many differences between this and previous versions.
What you will notice though is there are less reboots (hurrah!), the system crashes less (hurrah!) and Plug and Play is back (hurrah!!!!!).

I am using Windows 2000 every day, all day (something evil called work) and I like it. Annoyingly a lot of the menus have been moved around and there are a few features that just get really on my nose, for instance in menu items it only shows the most recently used items (you'll see what I mean). Also the whole system is full of helpful little "wizards" which basically talk you through the most basic of tasks which is very useful for new people using this software (but can get annoying after a while).

One other disadvatage with this operating system at the moment is despite everyone knowing its been coming out for at least 2 years there are a lot of software programs that won't work or require "patches". A bit shocking really and I expect this to be a problem for sometime yet (for instance we have a lot of HP printers which will not work on Windows 2000).


Overall this is a good package. It works, it looks nice and at the end of the day it doesn't really matter a fig what I really say because Microsoft is forcing everyone to go down the Windows 2000 route. But at least its route that you can be confident of.

*******

For some technical stuff. TCP/IP is prevelant in Windows 2000 as you would expect and anyone thinking of changing they're network to Windows 2000 will have to think seriously about "Active Directory" which is already getting a big thing. Also one big thing is that Windows 2000 is much more robust on laptops because anyone who has loaded NT4 onto a laptop will know its a complete bitch. There are some nice tools as well which allow you to monitor the systems with something called "snap ins" Win2000 comes with the snaps for perfomance monitor and such like but I wouldn't be surprised to see third party ones before too long (this is for Server versions though). As a user based operating system it is good because it looks and feels familiar to users and integrates all the best features from previous versions.

All in all not bad.

Summary: