The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

Win2k forever

"Microsoft announced yesterday that the company will expand its product-support life cycle to a minimum of 10 years for its business and developer products, extending the support for many of its products by at least 2 years. With this announcement, which the company made at the Microsoft TechEd 2004 trade show in San Diego, Microsoft says it hopes to make its product-support time line more predictable to meet the changing needs of its business customers."

http://www.winnetmag.com/Windows/Article/ArticleID/42795/42795.html

Is this a good move? Seems daring to me. Allowing win2k sever to hang on even longer, having even more versions out in the open at any given time.

Just me (Sir to you)
Friday, May 28, 2004

Win2k is going to be around for a long, long time. sssh... we are still on NT 4 for some things....

Sassy
Friday, May 28, 2004

We're still using NT4 as well. However we are investigating moving to Linux for our servers towards the end of the year.

Should be working
Friday, May 28, 2004

The big thing for me is that Win2k is the last "good" release that really brought a lot to the table. It gave me everything I liked about Win 98, plus all of the good stuff out of NT4. I haven't upgraded to XP at home simply because there was *nothing* worth paying the price for and everything to keep me from switching (primarily Product Activation. I own *every* piece of software that I use at home, with not a single piece of warez, but it *still* pisses me off) I don't have a HyperThreading capable system, I don't need a flashy GUI, etc.

So I'm perfectly content if Win2k lives on forever.

NT4, although good compared to 98, is still damn suckey compared to 2k.

Flamebait Sr.
Friday, May 28, 2004

Sounds more likely that they've had their bottom smacked by the large corporate users.

Simon Lucy
Friday, May 28, 2004

'Seems daring to me. Allowing win2k sever to hang on even longer, having even more versions out in the open at any given time.'

It isn't like they've a choice in the matter. A huge amount of customers are running 98 and NT. Remember a few months ago they tried to pull support for 98. They extended it. The same will happen with NT for a long time to come. Can you imagine the poor publicity if they quit making security patches for NT?

We don't need new Operating systems every three years for servers. I too like Windows 2k over xp or 2k3 simply because that was the last time searching for text strings worked properly and the search program didn't freeze up.

Maybe someone can weigh in on other vendors, but I believe Sun supports quite a few versions of Solaris, and IBM gives you support for a long time too. I think Microsoft is transitioning from giving home users a system and buffaloing them into thinking they need a new one every three years to selling to larger corporate accounts.

Mike
Friday, May 28, 2004

Someone just has to say hallo to Apple here:

Windows users can continue with old versions of Windows,
or if they buy XP, they can set XP to look like "Classic"
Windows.

OS 9 bootable Macs - gone forever!
Look & feel of old Finder - dead.

If only Apple was as "arrogant" as Microsoft sometimes.

VPC
Friday, May 28, 2004

You know, won't it be interesting if hardware vendors took initiative to eat up a section of the Windows or Linux or Apple kernel? A little more than the HCI?

No more platform dependent drivers.

I could really use that. Half the time it's the only reason why we are stuck using Windows.

Because why would Canon bother to write a Java/Dotnet/Java pure client if in the end they have to write pay tons of engineers to write many different versions of drivers?

Does driver architecture have to be proprietary? Do they have to shaped by how a kernel works? Can't there be a micro-kernel situation adapable by all OSes?

Li-fan Chen
Friday, May 28, 2004

I have found WinXP to be much better in stability, flexibility and speed versus Win2K on some of the dell laptops I have been stuck with. Personal experience - grain of salt implied.

m
Friday, May 28, 2004

I too thought Win2K was the best thing MS had ever done. But after installing Win XP Pro at home, I am amazed. This is rock solid. Call it a BSD with a decent UI.

RP
Friday, May 28, 2004

I was much more impressed with W2K3 than I was with XP, and I was pretty impressed with XP.

Prior to XP, I thought the "golden" version of the NT-class OSes was 3.51. :)

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Friday, May 28, 2004

Can you use Win2k3 as a desktop OS? I know it was built as a server, but what are the downsides of using it as a desktop OS?

RP
Saturday, May 29, 2004

As long as all your devices work (XP drivers generally work), then you can use it as a desktop OS. I use it 24/7 because of development requirements. I play games on it without any problem.

There are a few tweaks to make it perform like a desktop OS. Here's a short list of helpful tweaks.

* Changing Scheduling Quanta. Right click My Computer, click Properties. Click Advanced tab. Click Settings in the Performance box. In Performance Options dialog, click Advanced tab. Change Processor Scheduling to "Programs". Change Memory Usage to "Programs". Close out dialogs with OK.

* Changing Network Optimizations. Right click My Network Places, click Properties. Right click on your Ethernet/wirless card, click Properties. Double click "File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks". On the configuration dialog, change Optimization to "Minimize Memory Used". Close out dialogs with OK.

* Enabling hardware video acceleration. Right click the desktop, click Properties. Click Settings tab. Click Advanced. On the advanced properties dialog, click the Troubleshoot tab. Adjust Hardware Acceleration performance slider all the way to the right ("Full"). Check the "Enable write combining" tab. Close out dialogs with OK.

* Enabling hardware DirectX acceleration. Start / Run / DXDIAG.EXE. There is a progress meter in the lower left of the first tab page while things are being inspected. Wait for it to finish and disappear. Click the Display tab. Make sure all three accelerations (DirectDraw, Direct3D, AGP Texture) are enabled, if possible.

* Enabling maximum CPU performance. In the Control Panel, go to Power Options. Make sure the selected Power Scheme is "Always On", as this is the scheme that runs your CPU at full speed all the time. If you are using a laptop and wish to preserve battery power at the expense of performance, choose a different scheme. Just remember to revert it when you're back on AC power.

You may also want to disable the Shutdown Tracker (annoying for a desktop machine) and allow Shutdown from the login dialog.

* Start / Run / gpedit.msc

* Drill into Computer Configuration / Windows Settings / Security Settings / Local Policies / Security Options. Find the entry named "Shutdown: Allow system to be shut down without having to log on". Double click on it, change it to "Enabled".

* Drill into Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / System. Find the entry named "Display Shutdown Event Tracker". Double click on it, change it to "Disabled".

Finally, enable some services that are off by default in W2K3 as appropriate:

* IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service = Built-in CD burner services

* Themes = Allows you to use the Windows XP display theme

* Windows Audio = Allows you to use a sound card

* Wireless Configuration = Allows you to use a wireless network card

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Saturday, May 29, 2004

One other thing to be aware of. If you make your W2K3 machine an Active Directory Domain Controller, then the system turns off write caching on the hard drives automatically, which seriously degrades disk performance (to the benefit of data safety, of course). I would not want to use a Domain Controller as a day-to-day machine.

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Saturday, May 29, 2004

No worries about Active Directories, this is a home machine. UT2004, IntelliJ, Visual Studio and MS Office, nothing more.

RP
Saturday, May 29, 2004

I find Win2K more stable than XP Pro, but the time it takes to boot up drives me crazy.

However the difference between Win2K and either NT4 or win 98 was massive. XP wasn't much more than an NT5.0 service pack.

Stephen Jones
Saturday, May 29, 2004

Well, I just found this guide. Seems nice.
http://www.msfn.org/win2k3/index.htm

RP
Monday, May 31, 2004

Useful info, I've just installed Win2003 and am still getting it setup right. The shutdown tracker gets to be a pain for example, but booting is 3 times faster than Win2k. System overall seems a reasonable enough improvement over Win2K to be worth doing the upgrade.

The only hassle I've had so far was with ATI graphic card drivers using ATI's installer; I ended up manually installing them.

Pietro
Monday, May 31, 2004

Pietro, scroll up a few posts to my long post. It contains info on turning off the shutdown tracker.

I agree that the choice between W2K and W2K3 is no choice at all, if you're talking about free (i.e., an MSDN subscriber). W2K3 is superior in pretty much any measureable metric I can think of.

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Monday, May 31, 2004

I saw, I'll try changing a few things later.

Pietro
Monday, May 31, 2004