“Brace yourself. You may not believe this, but my latest
favorite desktop operating system is–drumroll, please–Windows
2000 Professional. 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.”
“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.”