Windows 2000: Smart, Stable, Still Needs Work

It's smart. It's sturdy. And if Microsoft can smooth some remaining rough edges, Windows 2000 will be surprisingly desirable. In hands-on tests, the latest prerelease version of Windows 2000 Professional proved compatible with more hardware and software than Windows NT Workstation 4.0 and friendlier to portable computing. It may not run well on older computers or on systems with 32MB or less of RAM. But if you have the right hardware and want a more stable operating system than Windows 98, upgrading to Windows 2000, which is expected to ship this fall, could make sense.

We installed the third official beta version of Windows 2000 Professional on two desktop PCs and one portable computer. ("Professional" is what Microsoft now calls the desktop version of the OS formerly known as Windows NT Workstation; Windows 2000 will also come in several server flavors.) Windows 2000's gently updated menus and utilities will make Windows 98 users feel right at home. And Windows NT 4.0 users will breathe a sigh of relief as features they had to cajole into working, or despaired of using at all, now simply work. Our main complaints--still-scanty driver support and an occasionally bumpy installation routine--are the kinds of problems Microsoft is focusing on in the final days of development.

Inherit the Windows

Upgrade is Windows 2000's middle name. Though directly descended from Windows NT 4.0 (Microsoft had originally planned on calling the new OS Windows NT 5.0), Windows 2000 is the first 32-bit operating system that will upgrade cleanly from Windows 95 and Windows 98.

Sure, Windows NT 4.0 will install onto a Windows 95 or 98 system, either replacing the existing OS or creating a dual-boot configuration. But it won't pick up existing Windows configuration settings or installed applications. Windows 2000 gives you the same basic choices--replace the existing OS or add Windows 2000 as a second OS. But when you choose the upgrade option, the new OS inherits your old settings and applications. (Veteran OS upgraders may still opt for the clean install, since it's likely to minimize conflicts with existing applications and .dll files.)

I experienced no major problems when upgrading Windows 98 to Windows 2000 on a Micron Pentium III-500 desktop machine with 128MB of RAM. First, the setup program asked me whether I wanted to stay with the existing FAT32 file system or convert to the NT File System. Unlike NT 4.0, Windows 2000 can read, write, and boot from drives partitioned with Windows 98's efficient FAT32 file system. If you want to dual-boot Windows 98 and NT 4.0, you are forced to use the space-wasting FAT16, which cannot handle disk partitions bigger than 2GB. (Windows 2000 will read FAT16 partitions, if necessary.) Security-minded Windows 2000 users who don't need to dual-boot will want to convert to NTFS, which enables file- and folder-level security and encryption. I chose NTFS, and the conversion proceeded without a hitch.

Next, the setup program scanned my system for potential compatibility and driver problems. It found only a handful. Although Microsoft promises that Windows 2000 will ship with much more hardware support than Windows NT 4.0 did, it will probably still lag behind Windows 98 in that department. The Windows 2000 setup program permits you to print a list of incompatible hardware and software, back out of the installation, and boot into Windows 9x, where you can uninstall incompatible applications and track down the missing device drivers.

My list of offending hardware consisted of the PIII-500 machine's Creative Sound Blaster Live Value sound system, a forgivable oversight in a beta but one that Microsoft had better correct by the time the new OS ships. If I'd had the driver disk handy, Windows 2000 would have copied the NT 4.0 driver files immediately. Instead, I updated the drivers after finishing installation. If neither Microsoft nor the hardware manufacturer has written a Windows NT­ or Windows 2000­compatible driver, you're sunk--Windows 9x drivers that don't conform to the Windows Driver model specification won't work.

The setup program also reported that several of my utilities--including Diamond Multimedia's InControl control panel and PowerQuest's DriveMapper (part of PartitionMagic)--would not work and that I'd need to upgrade them to new, Windows 2000 versions. However, the programs that really matter to me--productivity applications, e-mail, and Internet utilities--all worked perfectly after the upgrade.

Upgrading an older Pentium MMX-166 system with only 32MB of RAM--Microsoft's minimum hardware configuration for Beta 3--was more challenging. Chalk it up to the software's beta status, perhaps, but Windows 2000 gave me a surprisingly hard time with two common peripherals that Windows 98 takes in stride. First, its Hardware Wizard couldn't properly detect my Dell monitor and installed a generic driver for it. No big problem, except that when I attempted to install the correct driver from the wizard's list, it warned me that my choice was incorrect (it wasn't). More disturbing, Windows 2000 couldn't install my U.S. Robotics Sportster internal modem, even when I bypassed the Hardware Wizard and picked my modem from the list of available drivers.

After I completed the clean install to another partition, performance was noticeably slower on my Pentium MMX-166 computer than under Windows 98. Predictably, boosting RAM to the recommended minimum of 64MB yielded snappier performance.