Chapter 1. What Is Windows 2000 Professional?

In This Chapter

• The Architecture of Windows 2000

• Portability

• DirectX

• Windows 2000 Professional Security

• Multitasking

• Improvements and Changes from Previous Versions of Windows NT

• The Control Panel

• Windows 2000 Networking

Microsoft Windows 2000 is derived from Microsoft Windows NT. That earlier operating system was designed to be a standalone (optionally networked) operating system created from scratch without any serious architecture compromises. Unlike its Microsoft predecessors, MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 9x, Windows 2000 has capabilities and security comparable to enterprise operating systems such as UNIX and VMS. In fact, the chief architect of Windows NT, Dave Cutler, was also the chief architect of VMS.

One of the philosophical differences between Windows 2000 and its enterprise competitors is 2000's stress on being much easier to use and administer than anything else in its class. This, as well as many popularly priced applications, makes Windows 2000 Professional a good, perhaps the best, choice not only for heavy-duty workstation type uses, but for general business computing as well.

Other equivalent operating systems, such as UNIX, lack Windows 2000's wide array of applications or are very difficult to administer or both. Easy-to-administer operating systems, such as Windows 95/98 and its successors, lack Windows 2000's robustness, multitasking abilities, and scalability.

What today has evolved into Windows 2000 Professional got off to a slow start in the market. Its hardware requirements, especially RAM, required a serious commitment in money, and the benefits, due mostly to a lack of native applications, were few. After its release, however, Microsoft began a developer relations campaign to create the applications that would make the use of Windows 2000 more attractive to both workstation types and to general business. With the introduction of Windows 95/98, this campaign intensified and developers responded. At roughly the same time, system component costs, especially RAM and hard drive costs, dropped dramatically.

The combination of low-cost Windows 2000 hardware and the burgeoning crop of interesting software for Windows NT and its successors sparked quite a bit of interest in the adoption of Windows 2000, not only for workstations but for an everyday operating system, to replace MS-DOS, Windows, or OS/2. The introduction of Windows NT 4 in 1996 saw that spark change to a conflagration.

Here at last was an operating system with an interface any user could love, an uncompromising architecture, and a huge selection of popularly priced applications. To top the cake, due to lower hardware prices, it ran on popularly priced computers. In many ways, Windows 2000 is the apogee of operating systems. It fulfills the technical promise unmet by lesser operating systems, such as MS-DOS, Windows, and OS/2, while also meeting user needs (and application availability) unmet by its technical equivalents, especially UNIX.