hi esteban
you ask, "Is there an advantage to using NTFS"
i felt so, and chose NTFS when i installed win2000pro. read on for more info....
Windows File Systems
What You Need To Know About FAT16, FAT32 & NTFS
"NTFS prevents security breaches on local computers by letting you protect individual files as well as directories. FAT32 supported only share permissions, which protect a file over a network but don’t prevent someone from sitting at your computer terminal and accessing it.
NTFS also offers improved fault tolerance. It repairs hard drive errors seamlessly by comparing files to copies saved on the hard drive. If a copy doesn’t match, NTFS avoids that hard drive section and rewrites the copy to another part of the drive."
smartcomputing.com
and i am confident that you will also find this link to be very useful....
Windows 2000 File System: NTFS
"One of the first choices you have to make when you install (or upgrade to) Windows 2000 is the file system. FAT(32) or NTFS.
This is really an easy choice. There's only one reason not to choose NTFS; if you need to have an operating system which can't read NTFS (Win9x, MS-DOS etc.) to be able to access the partition. This limitation only applies to the local machine. If you want to access an NTFS drive across a network, any OS can access the NTFS partition."
windows-help.net
re, "Will I need to have separate copies of all programs to run them under the different operating systems?"
this is a simple question of compatibility, no? for instance, there are a few versions of symantec programs that i had that were not w2k compatible. mostly it's the obvious age correlation... the older programs will not run on the newer os's. (and vice versa... new symantec versions will not run on w95.)
there used to be a win2000 readiness analyzer tool, but that link is now broken for me and i am referred to the w2k home page microsoft.com
actually, i did just find this link... microsoft.com and it points to a couple other links that may help you to determine ahead of time how your system's hardware and software will fare with win2000.
hope this helps
:)
mark |
