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Windows 2000: It's Not For You
By Rob Pegoraro
Friday, February 18, 2000; Page E01
If you're running a home computer, don't buy Windows 2000.
This
may not be an obvious choice--what with the ads on the
sides of
buses, the banners across Web sites and the name that
suggests it's
the chronological and numerical successor to Windows
98--but
it's the right one. Just ask Microsoft.
"It was designed for business users," said Microsoft
Windows
product manager Bob Visse of the operating system that
shipped
yesterday. "I do not anticipate a lot of consumer pickup."
With an
upgrade price of $219 for Windows 95 and 98 users, that
seems
like a safe bet. Not to mention its finicky tastes in
hardware and
software: It won't work with many gaming devices, such as
3-D
cards and joysticks, and breaks the current versions of,
among
others, both America Online and Earthlink's software.
Instead, home computer users will have to wait another few
months for Microsoft's next consumer operating system, an
upgrade going by the name Windows Millennium Edition.
That's
Windows Me for short--easily the silliest brand name to
come out
Redmond, Wash., since the ill-fated "Microsoft Bob"
front-end
for Windows.
What's going on here?
The story starts with Windows NT, the company's
business-oriented operating system. "NT" is short for "New
Technology," meaning that it's not built on Microsoft's
archaic
DOS architecture and is therefore mostly immune from the
crashes and freezes that perforate most home users'
computing
experiences. Windows NT is not the kind of thing anybody
could
ever fall in love with, but it is also generally reliable
and robust.
It's also grown quite old--its last major update, Windows
NT 4.0,
shipped in 1996. Windows 2000 brings NT up to date, adding
some horribly overdue features (like support for Plug and
Play
and Universal Serial Bus devices), simplifying the user
experience
and enhancing its networking abilities. And once upon a
time it
was supposed to replace Windows 98 too.
"The Windows 2000 name was chosen when Microsoft thought
that they had successfully laid the Windows 9x line to
rest," said
Paul Thurrott, who edits the WinInfo site
(http://www.wugnet.
com/wininfo/). "After a few months, it became obvious that
Microsoft wasn't going to be able to ship a consumer
Windows
based on Windows 2000 within a year of 2000's release. And
the
company likes to release new versions of consumer Windows
every year, so they decided to go back to the 9x code base
and
rework one final version of Windows 98."
Microsoft acknowledges the potential for confusion with
the
Windows 2000 name, but says it adopted that moniker to
persuade
businesses that the operating system is a mainstream
product, not
just a tool for engineers or multinational banks. Visse
said that its
advertising will stress the home-vs.-business distinction,
avoiding
the hype seen at the Windows 95 launch: "There will not be
a
Rolling Stones song to commemorate the occasion."
Which brings us to Windows 2000: With more than 30 million
lines of code, it is the most complex, and
longest-awaited,
software Microsoft has ever shipped. Not that it's
bug-free as a
result of all the extra development time--the first
bug-fix update
came out before it even hit store shelves. Our first
attempt at
installing Win 2000 was a disaster: On a four-month-old
Dell
L500c home computer, it nuked the modem driver, despite
the
Dell Web site's assurances that every driver on the
machine was
compatible. I hate when that happens.
But there are also things to like in Windows 2000. I'm not
going
to discuss topics like server scalability or remote
administration
capabilities; I'm talking about things that will, or
should, show up
in the next home version of Windows.
Underneath a somewhat simplified interface (the useless
Inbox
and Briefcase icons are finally banished from the
desktop), Win
2000 is less willing to let badly written applications
trash the
system. Instead of lying down across the train tracks when
a new
program approaches and hoping for the best, it's designed
to
monitor what the program's installer does, then replace
any
crucial system files that were deleted, taking them from a
cache
of backup files. It's also set up to allow the user to
take the system
to its last stable configuration if things go wrong. And
programs
that are "certified" for Windows 2000 must use a new
installer
technology that lets applications reinstall their own core
files in
case those get trashed by mistake.
These are all common-sense ideas; the only puzzling thing
is why
it took Microsoft so long to figure out how much damage
poorly
written programs can do. (Anybody who's had their video
card
lobotomized by a new game, please raise your hand.) Their
addition to Windows Me should simplify at least some home
users' lives; they should be much more worthwhile than the
multimedia gewgaws Microsoft is tossing into this upgrade,
such
as a home movie editor. Notes Microsoft's Visse: "These
problems that we talk about with corporations aren't just
a
problem with corporations."
But what Win Me won't have that Win 2000 does is real
stability.
It's still going to have that DOS legacy lurking
underneath, so
you'll still have programs crashing the entire system.
You'll still
have to perform the "three-fingered salute" to reboot your
PC.
Thurrott, while predicting that "Windows Me will be more
reliable
than Windows 98," noted that, "The Windows 9x line has
definitely been coasting since Windows 95 was released."
But at least a five-year-old computer still has a prayer
of running
Windows 98 (well, once you disable the Web-desktop
integration), and you can't say the same thing for the
resource-ravenous Windows 2000. Or the consumer-grade
operating system based on it, currently due to arrive
sometime
next year.
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