New Features in Windows 2000 Professional

I recently played around with Windows 2000 Professional and Windows 2000 Server RC2 (Release Candidate 2.0). In this article I will discuss Windows 2000 Professional, which Microsoft has added numerous features to. However, I find that if you are proficient with Windows NT Workstation 4.0, then your learning curve for Windows 2000 Professional will be very small. There aren¡¦t many differences in the user interfaces between the two versions.

For Windows 2000 Professional, the new features I found to be most useful are:

ƒÞ The new hardware Installation Wizard. If you¡¦ve used Windows NT 4.0 before, then you know how arduous it can be at times trying to install new hardware: manually setting ports, making sure your device is on the Hardware Compatability List, changing CMOS settings, etc. However, if you¡¦ve installed new hardware on Windows 98, then you¡¦ll love the Windows 2000 Installation Wizard: They are basically the same thing. Also, Windows 2000 supports a broader range of hardware over NT 4.0; W2K also uses Plug and Play to detect new hardware to ease the installation process. When installing new hardware, you no longer have to worry about manual configuration¡XWindows 2000 will do it for you.

ƒÞ Another neat feature I found was the Offline Web Page Access, which is made possible with the integration of Internet Explorer 5.0 into Windows 2000. With this new feature, you can use the Offline Synchronization Wizard to schedule the download of your favorite web pages to your local hard disk and view the contents off-line. For example, if your favorite site is WWW.SUITE101.COM, you can configure data on the entire website or pages within the site to synchronize with your the data on your local disk, say every 2 hours or so. This is useful because the auto-dialer will do the job for you at the preset time, even if you¡¦re not home. This way you can view the contents of your favorite site offline.

ƒÞ Improved Power Management is another important feature. It is mostly aimed at laptops, but it can also be useful if you leave your computer on for an extended period. Power management is done through Window 2000¡¦s new feature called ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface). Until recently, NT 4.0 did not have any power management features (sleep mode, battery management, power management, etc.).

ƒÞ Windows 2000 now supports the FAT32 file system. NT 4.0 only supported the FAT16 (used mostly by DOS) and NTFS (NT File System) used by NT. Whereby, FAT 32 (Fat Allocation Table) is used by Windows 95 and Windows 98. Because NT 4.0 did not support the FAT32 file system, you couldn¡¦t upgrade from Windows 95/98 to Windows NT 4.0. However, since Windows 2000 supports the FAT32 file system, you can upgrade directly from Windows 95/98 to Windows 2000. With the FAT32 file system, you can format a drive larger than 2 GBs.

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