Windows 2000 is the next release of both Windows 98 and Windows NT.  Actually, Windows 2000 was originally named Windows 5.0 however, it was renamed for marketing purposes when a lot of Win95 and 98 people said that they would never upgrade to Windows NT.  Additionally, a lot of the good functions of Win 98se plus gamming capability has been  added to it to satisfy the next generation of users.

Windows 2000 from the end user and network administrator's perspective is great.  We currently have it in our office in production and it has reduced downtime considerably.  Yes, there are the occasional Restarts required, especially when using a scanner, however, nothing like Win 95, 98, and even NT 4.0.

Installation of Win2000 is smooth and easy plus it appears to be much faster than the other Windows products.  However, you're going to want to add more memory and get a bigger hard drive.  That's just the nature of Operating System evolution.  All of the application manufacturers will now be writing larger versions of their programs to take advantage of the new features in Win2000.

Also, we found that there is a significant performance increase with processor speeds 500 MHz and above as compared to the older processors.

We've tried both the Upgrade from Win98 and WinNT4.0 and the New install methods and have found that the New install on a freshly format hard drive is best.  Using the New install method gets rid of all of the old files and configurations left over from the older versions of Windows.  Sure, it's a bit of a pain to re-install all of the application software however, it's worth it in the long run.  Applications run cleaner and faster.

One area that has really ticked us off is that the Microsoft has made the Tape Backup process quite complicated rather than simplifying it.  Instead of performing all of the Tape Backup functions from within the Backup application you now have to go to the Computer Administration/Management applet and "Mount" and "Inject" the tape each time before use.  This reminds me of the old IBM 4381 and 390 tape management days.  BIG PAIN in the wazoo.

Below is the link to Web sites for Windows 2000: