So far, except for a shortage of drivers and a little slower to boot and bring up certain applications (which is anomalous because it brings other applications up faster than NT), W2K is better than NT4. There's really not much difference; it's NT with enhancements, an incremental release. ACPI, FAT32, the Win9x device manager (which is a significant improvement over NT4), USB, DirectX7, and that's the major list for a workstation user as far as I can tell. There are a lot of little administrative enhancements that don't affect me much, more available performance metrics & so forth.
As for backward app compatibility, once I got past a couple of days of BSOD's and a little bit of pleasant manual registry cleanup to really get rid of the few POS drivers and applets that W2K puked on (the king of which is Iomega software, among the world's worst), all apps work including 1394 video capture, which surprised me a little. The word is (from Microsoft themselves) that most games don't work in spite of the presence of DirectX 7, but I haven't tried any. Stability: no crashes after the baptism of fire was over. It now seems as stable as SP6a.
As I said, slight increase in memory usage. Also, I installed it on top of NT4; I haven't tried yet installing it on top of Win98. I hear that has a lot more problems but don't know first hand.
--QS |
