Rock solid - work & home! (Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional)

Member Name: Technical Tobes

Product:	Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional
Date:	27/08/00 (29 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Seriously stable

Disadvantages: err, won't run 'older' games.

I've been heading a Windows 2000 rollout for the past few months fo about 250 PC's & am now thoroughly impressed with Windows 2000.

Windows 2000 Professional is aimed as a business desktop client and this is where I shall rate it first....

I've been testing W2KP for about 3 months now with all our companies application software. It has not failed a single test - ALL application, including some very old DOS based database software ran without problem.
The only software that did give some problems (albeit minor ones) was Microsoft's own Office 97 suite!!!

When upgrading a Windows 95/98 client base to an NT platform, the area which commands most attention is the user profiles, Windows 2000 adds security issues which also need to be accessed before a rollout, in particular, if domain users are not made a member of the local machine, all kinds of strange, security related problems will rear there head at some point in the future. Nowhere is this issue identified by Microsoft at present - and it's not immediated obvious how to solve. (Service pack 1 is recommended although I've only 'noticed' one thing that it's solved).

The actual installation of Windows 2000 is a long one, typically rakes up to 2 hours to fully configure (that's wothout any applications) so imaging is the best way for a rollout.

By far the biggest advantage of W2KP is it's robustness, after Windows 95/98 which seems to crash at least once a day, Windows 2000 is nearing once a month - which is absolutly outstanding. Security has also been much improved, although to take full advantage a Winndows 2000 Server is required (not an simple undertaking!!).


And for home use....

Well, I really think Microsoft should just bin Windows Me, Windows 2000 Prof works fine at home, although gamers will find only about 60% of current games will run with it (Quake 2 & 3 are fine!!!), this falls to a much l
ower percentage for DOS bbased games - where pretty much none will run.
All applications & utils I use run on it - although you will need to do a bit of hunting for the latest drivers for a lot of things
But, all future games will - which begs the question - why WindowsMe (98 rebadged with a few, mainly graphical, changes)?? Surely it's time to ditch the old & unreliable technology of Windows OT (Old Technology - 95/98!!).
My point is, by the time W2KP becomes widely used, compatibility probs will be almost non-exisitant & all the games that won't run, will be too old anyway.

I'd highly recommend it for home use - it's never once blue screen at me - and when an application does crash (explorer has still got the old 98 bugs!!) you can recover from it with ease.

I love Windows 2000

Summary: