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There are 3 different versions of Windows 2000 that will be released:
Professional, Server, and Advanced Server. The version I'm using
is Professional, since that's the version that most people would use.
Here are the system requirements from Microsoft's website:
- 133 MHz or higher
Pentium-compatible CPU.
- 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM
recommended minimum; more memory generally improves responsiveness
[4 gigabytes (GB) RAM maximum.]
- 2 GB hard disk with a minimum of
650 MB of free space. (Additional free hard disk space is required
if you are installing over a network.)
- Windows 2000 Professional supports
single and dual CPU systems.
Ok, so far so good....however since I
only meet the minimum requirements for RAM, its obvious that there's
going to be some trouble getting good performance, but more on that
later. Aside from the RAM, the CPU and disk space requirements
aren't too bad, since I doubt anyone will try and run Windows 2000 on
a Pentium 133 anyway. If you're curious, the both Server
versions of Win2k require 256 MB RAM, so I guess I won't be trying
those out anytime soon.
The great thing about Win2k is the
ability to dual boot without having to deal with messy partitions.
The setup program asks if you would like to install over your current
version of Windows or setup a clean install by dual booting. I
chose to dual boot, so I can compare Win98 SE and Win2k easier.
Setup took much longer then it did for Win98....probably around 45 min
on my system compared to about 20-25 for Win98. Installation
went perfectly, however, as it was able to provide drivers for
everything in my computer. It provided basic video card drivers
for my card, which do not support D3D or OpenGl. For that I
installed beta Win2k drivers from Nvidia, which seems to work ok.
Performance
Ok, enough of that boring
stuff, so how does Windows 2000 actually run? Well, first of all
since I'm dual booting, I am automatically taken to a screen that
allows me to choose which version of Windows I want to use, with a
default setting that will automatically start when a timer runs down.
I decided to measure how long it took for each operating system to
start up, and Windows 2000 took about a half minute longer to start up
from the moment a choose which system to use. Of course, my
system isn't exactly in tip top condition, so I'm sure you'll fair
much better.
Going
around in basic Windows runs just fine, and it may be my imagination
but things seem to run a it more smoothly. Windows Explorer pops
up nice and quick and I browse through large directories rather
nicely. This is probably due to the fact that my current Win98
system is loaded with applications and games, hindering the speed,
while Win2k only has a few programs installed on it. Everything
is pretty much what I expected, as I really don't see any major
differences doing basic functions, even with my limited hardware.
However,
there was one major thing I noticed while going through Windows: web
pages loaded fast. And I'm not talking about a second or two
with the web page loading out of the cache. I'm talking 5-10
seconds faster on my cable modem. I knew the network
optimizations in NT were much better than 9x, but the difference was
astounding. You know all those demonstrations you see about how
much faster broadband is over traditional dialup? With Win2k,
web pages actually loaded up like in the demonstrations. Before
I thought it was merely a limitation of the cable service that
hindered speed, but it looks like the operating system also plays a
large factor.
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