There is no doubt about
it. Windows 2000 is bloated. It takes up gobs of space on your hard
drive for what it does. At the same time, it has, what some may
think, lofty system requirements. It is not as bad as NT4 was, which
required a Pentium-class machine with 16MB of RAM back in 1996. But,
it requires more than what some people have, but with the cost of
parts these days, a faster computer shouldn’t really be a problem.
The minimum system
requirements, as posed by Microsoft, are:
| Processor | 133MHz Pentium or higher microprocessor (P5 or equivalent compatible microprocessor) |
| Memory | 64 megabytes (MB) of random access memory RAM (128 MB recommended; 4 gigabytes (GB) maximum) |
| Hard Disk | 2-GB hard disk with a minimum of 650 MB of free space |
| Display | VGA or higher resolution monitor |
| Peripheral/ Miscellaneous | Keyboard and Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device (optional) |
| For CD-ROM installation: | A CD-ROM drive (12x or faster recommended) High-density 3.5-inch disk drive, unless your CD-ROM drive is bootable and supports starting the Setup program from a CD |
| For a network installation: | Windows 2000 – compatible network adapter card and related cable. Access to the network share that contains the Setup files |
You will, of course, want more
than this in order to run the OS to your liking. I ran it on a
Celeron 266 with 64MB of RAM. Being used to a Pentium II, I thought
it was kind of slow on that machine. Also, as I mentioned earlier, I
had to clear up lots of disk space to install it. But, running it on
a Pentium III-450 with 128 MB of RAM and it really rocked.
Final Remarks
Windows 2000 is indeed a good
operating system. It is a sweet blend of WinNT stability with cute
little features of Win98, like USB support, PnP, FAT32 support, DVD,
etc. It is bloated, as we can expect from a Microsoft
product, but it follows the NT tradition of overall stability. Here,
we reviewed the Professional version, which is more end-user
oriented. There is, though, the Server, Advanced Server, and
Datacenter versions, each an advance on the other.
I think Windows 2000 will be worth
the upgrade if you are looking for Stability. But, as
mentioned about, the hardcore gamer, especially the DOS gamer,
should stay with Windows 9x. Windows 2000 is starting to deliver on
the promises Microsoft made for the OS. It is now definitely worth
your consideration.
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