Click here to visit a guide to hundreds of financial links!
Click here to visit a guide to hundreds of financial links!
By Richard Morochove
First published August 12, 1999
Microsoft is gearing up for its biggest operating system launch this year. It's putting the finishing touches on Windows 2000, the successor operating system to Windows NT version 4. If you're an experienced computer user at home or business, you may want to upgrade to the new operating system to take advantage of some nifty features.
I've been using the beta test version 3 of Windows 2000 Professional for more than a month now, running on an IBM ThinkPad 600E, one of Big Blue's hot, thin notebooks.
Windows 2000, like NT before it, jettisons some of the baggage of the past, such as the venerable MS-DOS operating system. So if you still need to run a few DOS programs, then it's not the right solution for you. That's a key reason why I haven't recommended Window NT to some of my consulting clients.
The first thing you'll notice with Windows 2000 is the much improved user interface. It's similar to Windows 98 and much better than NT 4. However, Windows 2000 goes beyond Windows 98 in ease of use.
One of the best improvements is the personalized menu feature. The operating system initially shows all your menu selection options, but it keeps track of ones you actually use. After a few days, only your commonly-used selections appear on the system menus. However, you can click on a button to show all the selections.
The Network Connection Wizard lets you access all the ways of commonly connecting to a network in one convenient location. You'll find everything from dial-up connections to the Internet to a local area network in the wizard.
You may have a network at home soon, even if you have only one computer. Most of the high-speed Internet access services such as cable modems and DSL (digital subscriber line) from the phone companies require an Ethernet network connection to their service. It was a snap to set up a new connection to Sympatico's DSL service using the Windows 2000 wizard, although the instructions from the online service make it seem far more complex than it really is.
If you use a notebook that's usually attached to a network, but sometimes isn't, you'll love the Synchronization Manager. You simply right-click on any network file or folder and click Make Available Offline. Then you can access the files when you're not connected. This works for Web sites, too, and you can schedule updates.
Another new feature lets you access a printer over the Internet, great when you want to send a document to the printer in a hotel's business center directly from your room.
How does the Windows 2000 beta work with applications? It worked like a charm with Microsoft's Office 2000. I would have been most surprised if the left hand of Microsoft couldn't shake hands with its right. However, it won't work with all off-the-shelf Windows 95/98 applications, although Microsoft is committed to having the top 100 applications Windows 2000-ready by launch time.
One of the best ways to test out an operating system is to throw some tricky communications applications at it. So I gave Windows 2000 quite a torture test, installing and using trial versions of Internet telephony and other communications software not developed by Microsoft and using several at once.
The Windows 2000 beta got slower and slower and finally choked. I couldn't even shut down non-responding applications using the Task Manager. It just hung there for 15 minutes, not quite frozen, since the cursor could move, but without allowing me to use any application. I couldn't even turn off the notebook.
I'm sure it would stayed in that state until now if I didn't do what I did next, a very bad thing. I unplugged the AC adaptor from the notebook and removed the battery to remove all power sources from the machine. Not surprisingly, that finally shut it off. However, when I tried to re-start the machine, Windows 2000 hung up midway in the boot process, then tried to re-boot the computer after 5 minutes or so. Then the process repeated itself.
None of the usual system recovery options worked for me. I even got to test out the new Recovery Console that lets you boot the operating system directly from the Windows 2000 CD. While I saw my files were still on the hard drive, I couldn't access them easily from the Recovery Console's command prompt.
Eventually I got up and running again with some help from Microsoft's technical support gurus. Microsoft says that when the final version is released there will be more tools available for system recovery.
Windows 2000 has been a long time coming. Microsoft started work on it before Windows NT 4.0 was released way back in 1996.
Microsoft says Windows 2000 will be released before year-end, but won't give out a definite date. Since there's still a bit of clean-up to do, I suspect it will be launched later rather than earlier, probably in November, at the Fall Comdex computer show in Las Vegas.
Despite my unfortunate experience, I like Windows 2000. However, I'll wait for the final version before installing it on my main system. CW
Richard Morochove, FCA, is a Toronto-based computer consultant.
Copyright ©1999 by Morochove & Associates Inc. All rights reserved. This work may not be copied or distributed by any means without our prior written permission.
Air, Hotel and Car Rental deals at HopJet.com
Visit the
ComputerWatch Archive to see more columns
Post any questions or comments about this article to