New this Week
First, the news:
Microsoft Support Online must be adding back the product Technical Support pages which had been obliterated (see last week's article), because I found the outlines of the two NT pages hiding in a general Knowledge Base search. Not much there yet, except for one really nice page detailing the latest Hotfixes for NT. Much nicer than anything they had before "the change".
NT Web Forums
There are 4 NT-related web forums I know of with at least one or two posts per day (if you know of other well-visited forums, I'd love to know about them!). [The first] two require registration and login to post messages, although it's quick and pretty painless in both cases.
Windows Sources' Expert Answers has one huge, all-encompassing NT forum (no categories like "NT Setup" or "Administration"). It's a moderated forum (meaning that there are "hosts" checking in and answering questions), and there seems to be a community of regulars. It used to take forever to load, but ZDNet seems to have improved its responsiveness greatly. You have to register and login to post, but reading and posting messages is pretty straightforward. Just remember that "Message Tree" takes you back to the first page of the forum .
Windows NT Magazine's Forums are also moderated and well-visited. I find it better organized than the Windows Sources forum, though, because there are 5 separate NT forums, and each of those are further divided into a fistful of topic groups. Very well organized.
Once you choose a message thread to read, all posts in that thread are displayed on one page, and you don't have to wait for the whole page to load before viewing the first messages. This saves a lot of clicking around if you want to read a whole thread, and makes it easy to get back to the Top (you're only one step away from the Top at all times). You have to register and login to post here, also.
BHS's NT Tech Center is a large, but well-organized, message board. BHS (Beverly Hills Software), generally, is a good NT site, but it is a resource-intensive site. Read: frame-intensive and ad-intensive. The message board area uses seven frames, and while one could argue that 2, maybe 3, are put to good use (for viewing message threads and posts simultaneously, then possibly forum categories), seven is pretty ridiculous! However, if your browser can handle it, it's worth a look-see, and doesn't require registration to post messages.
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