The best Windows yet! (Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional)

Member Name: benlovell

Product:	Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional
Date:	30/05/01 (267 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Nice smoothed interface, Ease of use, Reliability

Disadvantages: Needs a fair amount of RAM

Hi!

At first I decided to install Windows 2000 Professional as the second operating system in a dual boot machine. The first operating system was Windows 98 which I had used for at least two years without much fault I might add.

I found Windows 98 to be very reliable over the years, although I did experience the dreaded BSOD or blue screen of death to the uninitiated! Try running Visual C++, Interdev, SQL enterprise manager and about ten instances of Internet Explorer and you will see what I mean. Anyway, after experimenting with Windows 2000 I found it that good I decided to completely wipe my Windows 98 installation and install Windows 2000 solely.

Windows 2000 has a vastly improved user interface with everything looking much less harsh than Windows 98/95/NT, icons turn a nice transparent colour when being dragged, menus have a nice fading effect and the OS has fallen into the general Microsoft look of tahoma font. You feel like you're using a more home user type operating system, which can't be bad after all!

There have been a whole load of 'under the bonnet' improvements some of which I will try to explain below:

Performance - The Windows 2000 operating system performs significantly better than other operating systems in the Windows family on systems with 128MB of RAM or more.

Reliability - I have used the OS for yonks now and I have honestly never experienced a crash or BSOD, even when debugging seriously lame C++ code that I have attempted to write!

Hardware Compatibility - A small thing for Windows 98 users but now business users can take advantage of newer peripherals which use USB or Firewire, which means I can use my spangly Microsoft USB mouse at work!

Hibernation - You can now enable hibernation which is a quasi quick boot, basically, the OS writes all information in RAM (memory) to the harddisk and then shuts down as usual. Upon restarting, the information from disk
is written back to RAM and you can carry on where you left off! Cool!

Internet Access - Microsoft is moving towards more net-centric use of all software nowadays and so you will find it extremely easy to connect to the internet with Windows 2000, and when you do, you will find it much faster than other Windows since the TCP/IP code has been re-written from the ground up.

I had never before set up a network but with Windows 2000 I was able to link up my old machine and my new one and have them sharing my ADSL internet connection in no time.

Ease of use - well, comparatively. There are wizards for most of the more involving tasks in the operating system.

To complement the new features listed above there have been literally hundreds of small improvements such as the addition of a defragment utility which you can use to keep your harddisk up to speed, and in tip top shape. DirectX 7 which means you can play the latest games at work (just dont let them catch you), and one real intuitive feature which hides items in the start menu and all menus in general, when they're not frequently used.

The best thing for me was being able to use IIS (Internet Information Server), COM+ and MSMQ without having to shell out for a server edition OS, but thats real boring programming stuff so I won't go into detail!

Overall, I would definately recommend Windows 2000 due to the greatly increased security, reliability and cool interface as well as a million cool things which you don't notice but which make it easier to use your PC day in day out.

Oh yeah, one last thing, I would definately recommend at least 256MB of RAM if you're going to use Windows 2000, you'll appreciate the speed boost you will get!

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