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

Software Support 

Windows 2000 is a 32 bit OS so it should support all Windows 95 designed software...right? Unfortunately that's not the case as you can guess and it’s absolutely normal since there are some great differences between the two OS. Most of your software (about 95%) will work correctly under Windows 2000 except:

Antivirus software that aren’t designed for Windows 2000 (Norton Antivirus 2000 Millennium support W2K)

Disk utilities: most of disk or utilities software don’t work or have minor issues under Windows 2000 like Partition Magic, Norton Utilities 2000, Firstaid, Hurricane, Norton SystemWorks from 1 to 2000, MagnaRam, SpeedyRom, QEMM, Norton Utilities 2 for NT…

Burning software: this kind of software needs an update to support W2k and burns your CDs. It’s the case for Nero, Adaptec Easy CD Creator, WinOnCD…

Communication software that used TAPI will need an update or an upgrade to work perfectly under Windows 2000. For example: Derina fax Pro, PCTelecommute, TalkWorks, Winphone suite has got numerous issues with Windows 2000 that’ll surely be fixed soon.

Windows related software: MS Plus 98 or MS Plus 95 won’t work on Windows 2000 as windows 2000 will impeach you to install Plus 98 or Plus 95!

Gaming Support 

Also some games won’t work under Windows 2000 such as Need for Speed 4, Microsoft Outwars and other software that will check what version of Windows you run (the CD of Windows 2000 contains an utility that will lie about the windows version, so it may help you to install some software).

Well as I said before, Windows 2000 includes Microsoft DirectX 7 and fully supports recent games that are claimed by their publishers to be Windows NT compliant. Microsoft has done a lot of hard work to make Windows 2000 game compliant. So this new release will perfectly supports Tomb Raider, SimCity 3000, Midtown Madness and a lot of other games. However a few games won’t run under Windows 2000 due to setup problems. Indeed some setup checked if you use Windows 9x or Windows NT. And if you use Windows NT the setup ended definitively (this is because NT 4 doesn’t support games). We have seen that Microsoft Outwars, Need for Speed III & IV don’t work at all under Windows 2000.

The 3D performance of Windows 2000 is correct and will be better if you used enhanced drivers that are Windows 2000 ready. Windows 2000 also supports OpenGL 1.2 technology! To be honest Windows 2000 is a good gaming OS even if it’d be better to use Windows 98 for games to do not have compatibility problems.