Windows 2000: Big Whoop

Do you remember Windows when Windows wasn't cool?

Maybe not. Windows always created a buzz, even before it shipped. Way back at the Comdex Fall 1983 show, it appeared in beta form alongside many other strange windowing-for-DOS creatures, crashing just as enthusiastically as the rest of them. But it was always the point of reference -- out-pointing technically better alternatives even when we in the press still thought that technical excellence was the key to success in operating systems.

In 1987, Windows 2.0 slipped out in the shadow of OS/2, the grand IBM/Microsoft scheme for operating systems -- or, as it turned out, the grand IBM scheme.

OS/2 was far better than Windows, but that was when IBM still thought that technical excellence was the key to success in operating systems.

So it went until Windows 3.0, Microsoft's declaration of independence from IBM.

Bill Gates even brought his mother to the gala 1990 kickoff and beamed at her like any proud son (she sat near me in the balcony of the fancy New York theatre). But it was another two years before the debugged Windows 3.1 was friendly and powerful enough to recommend to your friends.

Windows 95 debuted in a thunderstorm of publicity. (About the only form of life on the planet that didn't hear about it was the Mars bacteria scraped off some Antarctic rocks that year.) Windows 98 added bug fixes and some not-very-well-thought-out integration with Internet Explorer--bringing the Web's worst navigation feature, the Forward and Back buttons, to file management.

Meanwhile, Microsoft had turned its OS/2 project into NT, which debuted in 1993 as Windows for people who hate system crashes, then a rather small group. Three years later, with version 4.0, it picked up the Win 95 interface and was ready for prime time on desktops and servers of a certain size, but not notebooks.

All this was exciting for computer aficionados. But here comes Windows 2000, whose advertising slogan is (brace yourself!) "a new standard for reliability."

This is a worthy standard, and one I've long begged for, but it's not actually setting my heart frantically drumming.

Up Close and Personalized

I installed the final Windows 2000 on a Dell XPS T550 without much trouble. It had a bit of trouble with Norton AntiVirus and crashed once. And I'm annoyed that it no longer supports my Zip drive (not exactly an esoteric item). But basically things are--fine.

My thought was to play with the new operating system, but there isn't much to play with.

Oh, I know things would be different if this were a notebook or if our server was also running Windows 2000, but it's not terribly dramatic.

Some drama we can live without--if the promises of reliability come true, and it looks like they will. That's a big deal.

As usual in a Windows upgrade, things generally are better. The Control Panel is better organized and a lot more useful, it's easier to drop unwanted items from the Start menu, and there are nice new tricks like the ability to easily dress up folders with text, images, or HTML coding.

Also as usual, some of the changes are debatable. For example, the Start menu can be personalized to hide applications you don't often use. (Unfortunately, the more obscure applications are the ones I want to find on the Start menu--first I look to the taskbar, then the desktop, and the Start menu is my last hope for finding an app.) Some application issues remain. As usual, several of the applications I've installed don't show up in Add/Remove Applications. And as usual, some tweaks work only for Microsoft applications right now. For example, you get a line of Help on Microsoft apps that appear on the Start menu, but not for other vendors' programs.

And some changes never happen. It would be nice if you could shut down the beast with a single mouse click like on the Mac, which assumes that you know what you're doing when you click Shut Down. (Say, if Microsoft really were split into Baby Bills, wouldn't it be great if one was run by Steve Jobs?)

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