Windows 2000

Windows 2000 Professional has a lot to offer people who used to use Windows NT4. Windows 2000 is like Service pack 7 for Windows NT. It can play more games then NT 4 ever could. It multiplexes sound so that you can have winamp playing and still hear the beep when your mail comes in. It also has some speech features built in. Go to http://www.readplease.com for some free reader software. The icons and menus are very Windows 98 and if you have used Windows 98 and want to move to NT, Windows 2000 Professional is the one for you. I have been using Windows 2000 as my main desktop and I used the earlier Windows NT 5 betas (before they called it Windows 2000) and I really enjoy it. I have not seen one blue screen and they only trouble I had was getting it installed. It is easier to install then Windows NT 4 was but it could still be easier. If you are going to use Windows 2000 and most likely Office 2000 please make sure you have a good system. You need a 400mhz PII/AMD K6-2 or better and at least 128meg of ram and a 10gig or bigger hard drive. If you are looking at running Windows 2000 server, wait for the first service pack or look at Linux. The active directory is going to create a Hell for most network administrators and it will take years to figure it all out. If you do want to run server you will need another 128meg of ram to do the same things you are doing now but it seems to work. You have to watch out for unsupported drivers as a lot of the Raid cards are not well supported yet. The only good thing I can say about Windows 2000 Server is that it has terminal server and a telnet server build in. You can set up the terminal server service in admin mode and it will allow one person to connect instead of using PcAnywhere and no licenses are required. If you run the full terminal server service you will have to be client licenses for all your clients. So I give one thumb up for Windows 2000 Professional and one thumb down to Windows 2000 server.