Eric Bursley |
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Windows 2000:
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Microsoft released Windows 2000 Release Candidate 1 about two months ago. Participants in the RC0 Consumer Preview Program were eligible for a free upgrade to RC1. I took advantage of this offer and received my RC1 upgrade in 5 days. I quickly upgraded my RC0 Server to RC1. The upgrade went fairly smoothly, and took about 45 minutes on my Pentium II 450Mhz Dell Optiplex GX1. When everything was finished, I was running Win2k Server version 2072.
Some of the new features of RC1 include more available drivers for certain hardware peripherals. For example, you now have native Win2k support for SoundBlaster Live, and the 3Dfx Voodoo3. Another new feature is the new "dragging effect" in Windows Explorer. The icons are now shadowed when you move icons from one place to another. There is also a description of network folders available in the web view. This will help users to know whether or not a folder is online or off-line. Internet Explorer was also upgraded to IE 5.01. This upgrade includes many of the bug fixes, which are now available from the Microsoft Web site.
For the gamers in all of us, RC1 now has DirectX 7. RC0 only had a subset of DX7. This feature, along with the updated drivers for SB Live, Voodoo3, and ATI Rage, will bring more games to this platform, and possibly make it the premier multimedia operating system.
Win2k Professional also has an upgrade option from Window 98 Second Edition. Since there are differences between the registries of 9x to NT, some of the drivers and applications may not work properly under Win2k Pro. When I did this upgrade on one of my test computers, everything was properly detected except for my network card. After manually configuring the card settings, Win2k loaded the drivers for it and it worked perfectly. Win2k suggested I uninstall certain programs before preceding... those were: Norton Utilities for Windows 95, McAfee Antivirus, and a few others that were Win9x specific.
In summary, Windows 2000 Release Candidate 1 represented a major improvement over the initial Beta 3 release. With its minor interface changes, and a larger driver database, installation of Windows 2000 on any computer built before 1999 should be a breeze. In my next article I'll take a look at the additional improvements incorporated into Release Candidate 2, as Windows 2000 draws close to Final Release toward the end of this year.
Eric Bursley, MCSE
Network Engineer / Analyst
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