As I sit here writing this opinion I am waiting for windows 2000 to boot up after installing a hard drive. Actually I think it has hung up. I installed Windows 2000 as a fresh install not an upgrade. The installation took almost 3 hours. It found my PC Card reader, and all of my other peripherals except my DVD decoder card. (No surprise there.)

The setup requires that you have a minimum of a 133MHZ intel or comparable processor, 32MB or RAM though 64MB minimum is recommended, and 600MB of free hard disk space.

My install although very slow was thorough and like I stated earlier found all of my hardware except the DVD decoder. I had 2 hard disks installed one of which was not fdisk'ed. The second hard drive had to be fdisk'ed before it could be seen. I formatted the second drive with NTFS. The system told me it could not recognize the size of the volume. I then added the third Hard drive. (I currently wish I had a SCSI card with this computer and also SCSI hard drives as well. cause it does not allow me to see how SCSI works with Windows 2000.) Well since booting up with the third hard drive installed I have at this point locked up it looks like.

Windows 2000 has a look and feel more like windows 98. It does have some differences but it still feels similar. There is not "administrative tools (common)" under program group. The administrative tools are located in a different area.

It has been over half an hour since I started the reboot and the and I see some movement towards continuing to boot, but it is still no there yet.

When you look at hardware it is the same as Windows 95 and 98. This is more useful than the current method for windows NT 4.0. Looking at IRQ's. I/O addresses, and memory addresses requires getting to the correct menu, it is not as intuitive as Windows 95 or 98.

Windows 2000 has USB support, Smart Card Support, IEEE 1394 (firewire, i-link) support, and PC Cards are hotswappable, all of which is an improvement over Windows NT 4.0.

Software installation has been very easy so far. Upon installation of software, the software is usable with out a reboot.

It has been another 15 minutes since the last movement towards boot up and still has yet to get all the way up. Finally the screen has moved to show the desktop color but still not fully booted yet.

Well adding new hardware and having to reboot looks like it slows up the boot process tremendously. Since previous reboots only took twenty minutes I am under the impression that future boot ups will be similar in length. So far an hour has gone by and it is still not all the way up.

After 1 hour 20 minutes the windows 2000 sound has finally sounded, but still no desktop icons or start bar yet.

Well over all Windows 2000 professional edition is a good product, but i would not recommend it be purchased without making sure it will work with your company network the way you anticipate. I also do not recommend Windows 2000 pro being installed on machines with less than a 400 MHZ machine.

The Machine should have hardware installed before installation. I also recommend installation though a ghost image or similar method to decrease installation time.

this is a 3 star OS and if Microsoft follows there normal course this will be a 4 star OS in 6 months.



Recommended: Yes