Windows 2000 Professional is the buggiest Operating system I’ve ever used. It’ll only add misery to your life. Do not ever install it unless you have a very compelling reason to do so. This funny behavior of Win2000 has made my belief even stronger that Windows 98 is the best operating system in this world.
I’ll narrate my experiences in chronological order so that you can guess what has made me an ardent antagonist for this OS.
For no particular reason, just out of curiosity to try out another OS, I installed a fresh copy of Win2000 Pro on my PC. Date: 11 May 2003, if I remember correctly. I was using win98 before, which had been working quite satisfactorily for past 2-3 years. Firstly the installation took around 2 full hours (I have 128 MB RAM) and Win2000 occupied 1 GB of my HDD space. I patiently bared all that only to find out later that my modem wasn’t detected so I couldn’t connect to internet. I brought the modem installation disk and struggled with it for over 3-4 hours. I may here add that with win98 my modem was detected without any hassle and I could connect to internet very easily. But even then I kept quite. I have another PC at my home and could access internet though that.
’’Alright!’’ I said to myself. Just because an OS is unable to detect a blighted modem doesn’t make it too bad. I brought a LAN card (warning the vendor rather strictly that if it doesn’t get detected with my PC he should take it back and pay me my money back) and connected both the computers. It solved the problem for a while. It wasn’t after about a week that my PC just froze in the middle of my surfing. I was using Internet explorer and every time I used to get the funny ’’illegal operation’’ error. So I switched to Opera, the world’s fastest and most stable browser. Even that didn’t work too well with win2000. And that’s not all. Even if I don’t do anything with my pc and let it stand quietly for about an hour, it sometimes turns into that famous ’’Blue screen of death’’ with a mysterious message of Core-dump (or dumb?). And, every time I start my PC, I almost inevitably end up getting ’’Hard disk error’’ and scan disk scans my entire hard disk, delaying the already slow boot up process.
So, I would strongly advise that DO NOT go for Windows 2000 unless it’s the matter of life and death. (Saving your computer’s life instead of your own isn’t a very good idea. Is it?)
Alright! Having bombarded you thoroughly with the negative points, I must also add some positive ones. Otherwise my review won’t be balanced one, right?
The first thing I loved in Win2000 is its Disk Defragmenter. It takes only about 5 to 10 minutes to defrag a harddisk in win2000. The algorithm, it seems, is highly efficient and advanced. Secondly, the appearance is better than Win98 and ME. Win2000 uses what is called, Platinum Technology for the GUI, and hence the buttons, menus are rounded at their corners, adding an aesthetic look to your Windows.
Win2000 also has so called very powerful administrative tools which help administrators keep a watch on the system. And finally I may also add that the performance is slightly better. MS Office and Norton antivirus took only about 5 to 10 mins for the installation. It is for these reasons that I chose to ’’Recommend’’ this product. It didn’t work for me; probably I was unlucky chap. But who knows? It might work wonderfully for you!! But I strongly advise you keep your older Operating system and do a clean new setup instead of an upgrade (which replaces the old OS).
After considering all these +/- points, I took a wise decision to revert back to Win98. Reformatted my hard disk and went back to those ’’good old days’’.
(c) Amey Purandare.