I’m currently using NT 4.0 at work. I’m not on the company’s network, and our IT people generally leave me to my own devices. But it has been suggested that I might want to move to Windows 2000.
I’ve found in both the application at my job, and on the network for my own company I’m currently selling off, that NT is a very stable platform that rarely gives me any problem. Note that I do have W95 box at home that is 95+% just a 'net cruiser. That one does hang and beg for reboots - different world.
Other OSs are not really an option as I’m married to my primary applications. So, what pitfalls might I encounter in switching to Windows 2000? Does it do multiple CPUs? Does it have any problems migrating NT apps? While I like NT, I’ll admit it’s a bit unscrutable - is Windows 2000 that way as well? And, for the wary, can it be installed as a dual-boot the way I did it when I first upgraded from NT 3.51 to 4.0?
I am using windows 2000 on my home system. I absolutely love it. It is as stable as a rock. The networking was cake. it is built on the NT ground work so I wouldn’t think that any NT application would not work with 2000. 2000 is also much more liberal on the use of software that was not made for NT. Many of the older programs will not work with 2000, but most of the new programs do. I am extreamly happy with win 2000
Windows 2000 is really great, almost rock solid (crashes sometimes while booting, but nothing irrecoverable) and combines the feature set of NT and 2000…
The question here for your IT people is: WHY?
What is the business case for upgrading the business to Windows 2000? Do any new applications or hardware requires Windows 2000 (aparts from games that need DirectX 8, I can’t see…)?
NT 4.0 SP 6 is as solid (or possibly more so) then Windows 2000 because W2K introduces a lots of features that may contain new bugs.
Prepare to pay for some training (yes, it is different) and licenses.
As for your questions:
-yes, it does multiple CPU (I have a dual at home) well.
-NT apps seems to work well under w2k, althought they are exceptions.
-w2k as a lots more features then NT put they are generally quite easy to put to use.
-dual boot should be possible (I dual boot w2k and Linux)
Company wide, I don’t know. Perhaps they feel like it somehow enhances their ability to administer the company network. As noted, I am not a part of that. And, while they don’t currently support me, they can probably see that eventually they may have to; perhaps they’re suggesting it to get me in line with the rest of their systems.
The only other thing I see is that my primary apps’ vendor is no longer supporting W95 (and always recommended NT anyway), I can see the day coming where they drop NT and support just 2000.
Stability is part of why I like NT, and apparently 2000 is even a bit better. Other than that, and exclusive of networking issues, is there anything else 2000 does that I’m missing in NT?
rngadam’s response has the flavor of “don’t change until you really need to.”
From what I’ve seen Windows 2000 is pretty stable, on a par with NT. Most, but not all, NT applications will run on it. I’m not sure about Win 95/98 apps, that is the ones that wouldn’t run on NT. I’d bet that many of those still won’t run on 2000.
Win2K is what used to be called NT5. It is the next NT. The name change occurred near the end of '98. This was essentially an aesthetic/marketing issue.
Well, where I work as an admin, the goal is to upgrade all 10,000 plus machines, win95,98, and NT to Win2k. (includeing all laptops)
Quite a few reasons,
Security wise, it allows a higher level of granularity for assigning rights. Stability wise, it is more stable than NT, and easier to administer, especially remotely. Also, it supports kerberos authentication, so it can share user authentication with Unix boxes. If you can go completely Win2k/unix, you can get rid of all the lan manager crap on your network. It supports USB, and plug and play, and the self healing stuff in it kicks ass. Someone deletes a file it needs, it puts it back. The boot off a CD and run repair option really works most of the time, unlike NT where it works some of the time. I have been using win2k since beta 2, and even though I am not a big microsoft fan (I guess I should be, because their buggy products supply me with a source of income), I am pretty happy with Win2k. The only reason I don’t run it on my home machine exclusively is that I use my computer for recording, and most of the recording software I use doesnt really run that well on it. Oh, and for laptops, it works much better than NT.
Umm… Service Pack 1 was a disaster, it introduced several disastrous bugs and I had to reinstall Win2k from scratch. SP2 is rumored to have new subscription-based registration, you must register with Micro$oft, keep in contact via the internet with their server, and it will make sure you paid the monthly subscription fees or your machine won’t boot. I don’t know if this will really happen, but I know BillG is greedy enough to try it.
BTW, I recently did a web-design job for a major financial company. They’re an all-IBM/Microsoft shop, with major AS/400 horsepower and a huge local network. And they froze their whole infrastructure on Windows95. No upgrades beyond Win95 without compelling arguments from management that they need a specific software package that will only run on a newer OS. They have maybe a couple of hundred Wintel boxes but less than 10 run Windows98 or higher. And this company does serious, cutting edge Java programming. You don’t need Microsoft’s latest bloatware to do serious work.
Have you tried this? It doesn’t work. The Kerberos team at MIT complained that the MS implementation of Kerberos is not interoperable with Unix versions. The MIT guys said MS deliberately broke with the Unix standard to force people to switch to MS authentication systems.
MS, in thier usual style, modified Kerberos. Certain flavors of Unix will work, some won’t. So basically, the company produceing the particular type of unix will have to bend slightly to Microsofts will. I really think that it is an ego thing with BG. However, they dont have to switch to MS authentication, just modify thiers a little. Still pretty crappy way to go about it, but better than what they had before.
The supscription based thing sounds like urban legend to me, but I wouldnt put it past them. We get to play with all the latest and greatest MS crap here, and this is the first I’ve heard of it.
The company I work for is a major defense contractor, so security is big deal for us. Win95 can’t be locked down enough, and when you have as many users as we do, all trying to install crappy shareware screensavers and such, it becomes a big headache to manage. Win2k, at least for us, is a much better solution.
You say you have had problems with SP1? I’ve loaded it, and not had a bit of trouble. Maybe I just got lucky, but I havent seen any other problems at work either.
If an application runs on NT, it should run on Win2K. Win2K has an application checker tool you can use to test applications for compatibility, but I haven’t really given it a stress test.
Unscrutable? What do you mean?
Yes, it can–with one caveat. I assume that you’ve got SP3 or later installed for NT4. If you don’t, then you’d need to, since Win2K uses a different version of NTFS than NT4 does. When you install Win2K onto a computer that has any NTFS volumes already on it, it will automatically convert those volumes to the newer version, and NT4 cannot read NTFS5 volumes unless it’s got at least SP3 installed. (That said, the increased hardware requirements for Win2K make it unlikely that you’d use the same machine, unless you’re running NT4 on a very new computer.)
You might want to check out the November edition of Windows 2000 Magazine, which (in that issue; it’s normally more server-focused) looks at Win2K Pro. That will answer a lot of your questions about how Win2K Pro is different from NT or from Windows 9x. My reasons for preferring it may not be yours–depends on what you’re doing with an OS.
The subscription thing is a bit more than urban legend, but I do not expect it to show up with SP2 for Win2K. (I don’t work for Microsoft, but I would almost certainly have heard about that.) And while 2000 has safe mode (like NT4 does), I think that Whammo is talking about the Recovery Console, which is a great addition to NT. Finally, I’d also ask your IT people why they suggest moving to Win2K. Are they supporting it, or do you have to?
For the future that’s an unknown at this point. Presently I take care of myself. Frankly, I’m of the if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it school.
NT4 SP5 on a dual 850 MHz Xeon that’s about 9 months old. W2K was out when we bought it, but NT was the devil I knew and I thought it best to give W2K time to mature.
The subscription thing is a bit more than urban legend,
Just curious, but are there any cites on this?
but I do not expect it to show up with SP2 for Win2K. (I don’t work for Microsoft, but I would almost certainly have heard about that.) And while 2000 has safe mode (like NT4 does), I think that Whammo is talking about the Recovery Console, which is a great addition to NT. Finally, I’d also ask your IT people why they suggest moving to Win2K. Are they supporting it, or do you have to?
In my case, I am my IT People. at least part of my IT people. I/we do support it, and have for some time now.
It’s part of the “software as a service” initiative (look up the phrase on MS’s Web site). To the best of my knowledge (and no, sorry, I don’t have any public cites–this information is worth what you paid for it) MS has at least for now scrapped the idea of making people rent shrink-wrap software. However, they’ve become really hot on the application service provider model which does require subscribers to pay a monthly fee to keep access to their applications. So far as I know MS has not said anything about making all licensing work like this.
Sorry if this wasn’t clear, but the question was for beatle, since his IT people were evidently the ones pushing for him to upgrade and I wasn’t sure if he had to do his own support. Sounds like he does. Since he doesn’t care about upgrading, he doesn’t seem to need it, and he’d have to support it, I personally would stick with NT4 until I came up with a compelling reason to upgrade, even if that compelling reason were “you have to use Win2K or you don’t get any IT support.”