Faster performance:

One aspect that everyone will be concerned with is the overall performance of Windows 2000.  Microsoft’s testing shows that on a system with 64MB of RAM, Windows 2000 is 25% faster than if the machine were running Windows 98.  I’m a bit skeptical of this, as I suspect 128MB of RAM would be required for that kind of speed increase. However, I do agree that Windows 2000 is faster than Windows 98 on most machines.

Microsoft says that Windows 2000 is comparable to NT 4.0’s performance.  From personal experience, I would say Windows 2000 is faster than NT 4, but not by a wide margin.  If it says anything, I now run Windows 2000 ONLY on my main machine.  No Windows 98, no NT 4.0.  Of course, I have 256 MB of RAM in my main machine, which is helpful.

There has been some concern about the performance of Quake 3 in Windows 2000 against Windows 98.  The concern centers over certain sites’ benchmark’s giving the performance nod to Windows 98.  This is entirely possible, because drivers for Windows 2000 aren’t very good at this time.

The default TNT drivers that ship with Windows 2000 for example, won’t work with many OpenGL games.  As I write this, Nvidia has a beta driver version 3.69 available that some sites say give a decent speed increase. 

Keep in mind that this release of Windows is akin to the release of Windows 95: Driver and other support will be a bit off for several months after its release.  Of course, many people are complaining about the driver support while the product isn’t even on the store shelves yet.  J

Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP): 

Like it’s predecessor, Windows NT Workstation, Win2k Pro ships with support for two processors out of the box, and support for up to 4GB of RAM.  Just as with NT 4 Workstation, Win2k Pro can support more processors if vendors care to write their own HAL’s to enable it.

Windows 2000 handles multitasking even better than NT 4 Workstation, which is an admirable feat.  I have run a wide variety of programs simultaneously on Win2k Pro, and haven’t run into any problems. 

The best part about the SMP in Win2k is that Win2k actually supports plug and play, and a wide variety of applications.  Win2k truly has the reliability and security of Windows NT coupled with the ease of use and compatibility of Windows 98.

Unfortunately, making SMP work properly on Windows 2000 can be a pain with non-ACPI compliant motherboards.  For example, I have an Asus P2L97-DS motherboard with onboard SCSI and the LX chipset.  While not a screamer, it’s setup as a dual P2-333 with 192MB of RAM and it runs fine for my main server at home.

This motherboard wouldn’t work properly under Windows 2000 without a lot of tweaking.  The problem is that Asus didn’t make the board fully ACPI compliant, and so far has been unable to rectify that via BIOS patches.  Some of you may remember this board as one that Asus built with improper voltage capabilities that prevented the TNT boards from running.  Thankfully, mine was built late enough that Asus fixed that problem.   

While you can configure a non-ACPI compliant system to work with SMP, I highly suggest getting an ACPI compliant motherboard.  When I tweaked mine to work, I still had random CPU spikes and system lockups.  ACPI stands for Advanced Configuration and Power Initiative.  While Microsoft had to twist some arms to get this to become a standard, it does have some nice features, and in the long run will probably be worthwhile.

Enhanced UI:

Internet Explorer 5.0 is integrated into the Win2k shell, along with some other new improvements to the shell.  For example, Win2k has personalized menus: Win2k learns which programs/features you use most often, and then compresses your start menu or other menus to show just those programs.  Of course, it’s easy to expand the menu to see your full suite of applications, but it’s nice to have a compact view of your most used applications. 

One especially nice new shell feature is the preview window for any multimedia.  Open up a folder with a sound, picture, or movie, and in the left hand of that folder you’ll be able to preview it.  In the case of pictures, you have resizing and zoom capabilities, and with sound/video, you have the Windows Media Player capabilities of pause, adv/rew, etc. 

For web designers and other graphic artists, the preview pane is a godsend.  It also works for mp3’s, which is helpful for people such as myself who have a large collection of unlabeled mp3’s.

Troubleshooters and Wizards That Don’t Suck:

Let’s face it: Troubleshooters and wizards in most products, and in past Windows operating systems, have just sucked.  I’m very pleased to report that Windows 2000 breaks that trend.  The Wizards easily and effectively walk you through complex tasks, and the troubleshooters sometimes have helpful suggestions that go beyond, “Is it plugged in?”   

While I’m advanced enough of a user that I rarely use a troubleshooter, I often use the Wizards because they really make complex tasks that much easier.  Microsoft is finally making Wizards live up to their potential. 

For example, those of you who read my articles on NT home networking know all of the steps to connect to a PPTP server.  With Windows 2000, it’s a wizard that takes less than 30 seconds, assuming you know the IP/name of the server you want to connect to. 

Enhanced Security: 

One area that Microsoft seriously enhanced in Win2k is that of security.  Just about every aspect of Windows NT’s already robust security has been improved upon in Windows 2000. 

One improvement that jumps out and grabs you is the new Encrypting File System, or EFS.  EFS transparently encrypts and decrypts files and applications for the user.  When I was on the Windows 2000 team, the build tree server used EFS: Every piece of code checked in or out of the Visual Source Safe tree was automatically encrypted and decrypted for the user.  I can assure you that if EFS could handle those duties, it can handle anything. 

Another big new feature in Win2k is Kerberos support.  Kerberos (named after Cerberus, the mythical 3-headed dog that guards Hell.  Why not Cerberus?  Kerberos can be trademarked.) 

Kerberos is an Internet standard authentication protocol that is not only extremely secure, but also UNIX compatible. 

The IP Security features in Windows 2000 are extremely thorough and effective.  While that topic is too large to go into now, these features make it very safe for a company to deploy a Virtual Private Network across the Internet using Windows 2000. 

Upgrade Recommendations: 

While Microsoft took great pains to ensure an easy upgrade to Windows 2000 from NT 4 or Windows 9x, I encourage everyone to do a clean install whenever they’re installing a new OS. 

By doing this, you’re guaranteed to start at a clean slate, and this minimizes problems.  While I have no benchmarks to prove this, my experience is that an upgraded machine is a little slower than the same machine upgraded from scratch. 

We all know that formatting a machine can be a real pain in the ass, but it’s a good opportunity to make sure that everything is working properly, and you have no mysterious system gremlins. 

Another great thing about a clean install is that once it’s done and all of your applications are installed, you can take an image of the machine and have it ready for disaster recovery. 

If you insist upon doing an in-place upgrade, that’s fine too.  You shouldn’t have any problems.  Many testers at Microsoft verified that this scenario works well, and from my experience, it does. 

If you want to optimize your system for Windows 2000, here are my recommendations in order of effectiveness: 

RAM: Don’t have anything less than 128 MB.  256MB is great for SMP.  In general, the more the merrier with RAM. 

Disk: Unless you have a crappy processor (Less than a P-Pro) you’ll see a big improvement by increasing your hard drive’s speed.  I’ve had the pleasure of using Windows 2000 with Seagate’s excellent Cheetah 10k RPM SCSI drives, and it makes a difference over a similar machine with an old IDE drive. 

Processor: Obviously, the faster your processor, the faster your system will be.  Rarely is your system processor the biggest bottleneck, so make sure your RAM and disk is adequate first.  Windows 2000 likes cache, so make sure to get a proc with as much as possible.  This puts the Celeron lower on the list of processor desirability than Intel might like, but they’ll be happy if you scrap your Celeron for a Xeon.  I don’t have any experience with running Win2k (or any OS) on an Athlon system, but we at 2Cpu.com are trying.  If anyone out there would like to donate an Athlon system or components for Windows 2000 testing, I would be more than happy to run the tests of their choice

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