1GQ's Full Review: Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional Full Version f...
Faster than Windows 98 and more stable than Windows NT, Microsoft really delivered on Windows 2000 Professional. Since installing it two months ago I haven’t looked back, well maybe once or twice.
The most impressive thing about this latest incarnation of NT is its stability. Most of us are all too familiar with NT’s notorious blue screens; I happy to report that I have yet to experience a single OS crash with Windows 2000 and although I have run into the odd application crash or lockup, its far fewer than with Win98 SE.
As expected Win2k is quite large, eating up a whopping 600MB on my hard disk; significantly more than either NT 4 or Windows 98 SE, yet significantly faster than both its predecessors. Boot time is half what it took Win98SE on my PC; large apps like Photoshop and MS Office are slightly quicker too. Better yet, Microsoft finally thought Windows resource management, I multi-task Word 2000, Photoshop, IE5, and an MPEG4 movie with no apparent loss in performance, except in disk read.
Plug n Play finally works! Hot swapping USB devices often caused a general protection fault when I was using Win98, no problems anymore. Surprisingly Win2k detected and had drivers for some devices that even the manufacturer said is not compatible like my Dazzle DV-Editor IEEE-1394 FireWire card. For others like digital cameras, check the manufacturers website frequently…Sony finally released a Win2k driver for their CyberShot line.
Sounds good doesn’t it, so why did I look back? Compatibility. I was fortunate that all my hardware was popular high-end stuff (home built PC) so either Win2K had a driver built in or the manufacturer did. On the software side it was a very different story. Win2K does have a version of DirectX 7, but a lot of games didn’t work…actually the majority. That’s ok, the only game I was still playing did…but it had trouble playing digital speech, which might have been the sound card driver (beta).
On the application side, everything from Adobe stuff to MS Office 2000 worked like a charm. Programming environments like Visual Studio 6.0 failed. Systems utilities failed too of course, no I’m not talking Norton Utilities...that’s a no brainer. I’m talking Symantec Ghost, and more importantly CD-R software like Nero Burning Rom. Well a new version of Nero has appeared and works great, however I haven’t had a chance to try the new Ghost 6.0 yet…so I’m currently running without a rescue image. Since I’m not a hardcore gamer, I stuck with 2000 and its gaining more and more support fast.
Based on input from friends and colleagues you’ll probably need a PII 450 or faster with at least 96MB of ram to realize the performance gains. I myself have a P3 566 with 192MB of PC133 SDRAM and a 7200rpm Ultra DMA66 hard-drive…not to brag :-)
In conclusion Microsoft has finally got the Windows recipe right. Support for cutting edge multimedia, true plug n play, increased speed, performance, and stability; if you got the hardware and don’t play many games, I highly recommend dumping ’98 and jumping on the 2000 bandwagon!
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