Product: Windows® 2000 Professional operating system
Company: Microsoft Corporation
Website: http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000
List Price: $319.00 
Review By: Julien Jay

Hardware Features

UPS device has never been correctly recognized by previous releases of Windows 2000. This new release totally supports the APC power solutions by integers in the power control panel applet a dedicated tab that displays the status of the UPS if it’s connected to the serial port. 

USB? Every Windows NT 4 user knows that it’s impossible to connect an USB device to NT 4. Hopefully Windows 2000 fully supports the USB bus. The only requirement is to have specific Windows 2000 drivers for your USB devices. For example: Windows 2000 recognizes a USB ISDN modem but as it doesn’t integrate the correct drivers you have to find and install a Windows 2000 specific driver to make it work… This is the same thing for the imaging devices such as Web cams, scanners, TV… But USB devices such as mice & keyboards are well recognized by Windows 2000. But for input devices such as the last one of Microsoft (IntelliMouse, Natural Keyboard Pro) you have to download the latest available drivers from the Microsoft website. IntelliPoint 3.1 & IntelliType 1.1 fully supports Windows 2000. Older releases don’t. USB hubs are automatically detected by Windows 2000 and they don’t need drivers.

As everyone knows AGP is the ultimate graphic bus to achieve high graphic performances. Windows 2000 now fully take benefits of this technology and it’s bundled with DirectX 7. So you’ll enjoy high 3D performances in your games or 3D software makers.

Windows 2000 natively supports a wide list of video graphics cards such as Matrox Millennium, ATI All In Wonder, S3 cards, etc… But last graphic cards like the Millennium G400 Max and the GeForce 256 ones aren’t recognized by Windows 2000. So as always you’ll have to find and install appropriate drivers for these cards.

Windows 2000 supports the DVD technology via the Microsoft Windows Media Player software if you’ve got the appropriate driver that supports Direct Show. For example, the Creative DXR3 MPEG II card isn’t recognized by Windows 2000 (unlike DXR2) and there are still no Windows 2000 drivers from Creative… So you’ll have to wait to see your favorite films!!

Sound cards: Windows 2000 recognizes all the great and widely used sound cards such as for example all the Sound Blaster brand… Even the last Sound Blaster Live card is recognized by Windows 2000. But even if it’s recognized, if your SB Live is connected to four speakers you’ll only hear sounds, music, on two speakers.

So you’ll have to update the drivers by the one of Creative that will be available sooner. But please note that for example you shouldn’t install the LiveWare 3 software on Windows 2000 as it’s not supported and it may cause huge conflicts!

'Exotic devices’: Travan backup tapes like the Hewlett Packard ones that use parallel port aren’t supported by Windows 2000. And other parallel port devices, except printers, have a great chance to don’t work under NT such as for the moment the Pinnacle MP10 device.

Windows 2000 Professional fully supports and extends the ACPI technology that will save power on your computer. You should have a BIOS that supports ACPI to enjoy the features that it offers: you can shutdown your computer by just pushing a button; and the most interesting thing is the hibernate feature : click hibernate and your computer silently shut down and it’ll quickly restart to its previous state. So for example if you work on Excel when you hibernate, waking up the computer will bring you back to your Excel opened document. It’s fast & reliable.