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Believe it or not! W2K is the real deal

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols AnchorDesk

Published: 20 Jun 2000 11:39 BST

Yes, I am the same guy who recommends sticking with NT rather than Windows 2000 on servers. And I'm also the fellow who believes that Linux is today's top server operating system by a wide margin. But that's servers. Here, I'm talking about the desktop.

I also like Corel's Linux running WordPerfect Office, but I can't sing its praises as loudly as I do for Windows 2000 Pro. That's because Lotus Notes, QuarkExpress and many of my mission-critical apps still don't run under Linux.

Besides, Corel has had more financial and legal pitfalls and traps underneath it lately than Harrison Ford did in all three Indiana Jones movies. Like Dr. Jones, Corel CEO Michael Cowpland has proven to be a corporate escape artist. But he's no Indiana Jones. Short of a miracle, sooner or later, Corel must go down.

Which brings me back to Windows 2000. Officially, almost nothing is W2K compliant today. Unofficially, it runs every application I use daily -- Pegasus Mail, Lotus SmartSuite, Microsoft Office, Quicken, RealPlayer and Netscape Communicator.

Applications, though, are only part of the story. W2K Professional also is much faster than Windows 98. On my main workstation -- a Dell OptiPlex 300 with a 667MHz Pentium III and 256MB of RAM -- applications tend to run about 10 percent faster than they did under Windows 98. Most importantly, W2K Pro is 10 times more stable than 98 and a good deal better than NT Workstation. Mind you, W2K is no Unix or Linux. My Corel workstation still hasn't seen its first failure in 2000, but W2K Professional has gone down only about once a month. In comparison, I could expect NT Workstation to go south on a weekly basis and Windows 98 Second Edition (SE) to blow out every other day.

When you've got to run a Microsoft operating system on the desktop, there's no question in my mind that W2K Professional is the one you want--assuming your equipment can handle it. I tried running W2K Pro on a 350MHz Compaq Presario with 96MB of RAM. Performance was so bad that I downgraded to Windows 98SE after three days. How slow was it? It was "I'd-rather-wait-in-line-with-my-11-year-old-daughter-for-Back-Street-Boys-tickets" slow.

It's not an easy upgrade, either. W2K's device support needs lots of improvement. You also can hit some annoying application-incompatibility snags -- especially with games.

Still, if you've got the necessary hardware and expertise, go ahead and upgrade to W2K Professional. Just don't go overboard and try it with W2K Server yet.

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