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Just upgraded to Windows 2000: thoughts and first impressions

I

igowerf

Diamond Member
Upgrading to Windows 2000 has been quite an experience for me. It all started this afternoon...
I turned on my computer and Win98SE started to load. After my desktop loaded, I moved my mouse over to the Internet Explorer icon and my system freezes. This has happened to me before and I had to reformat to fix it. It happens whenever I mess around with hard drive settings and related stuff. I tried the basic process of trouble shooting but nothing worked so I booted into DOS mode and typed "format c:"
After reformatting, I started installing Win2k.

Here are my thoughts and first impressions of Windows 2000.

1. Setup.exe didn't work in DOS mode. BUT I JUST FORMATTED. CRAP. Luckily, I know my DOS commands and I opened up the readme's (EDIT pro1.txt).

2. FOUR SETUP DISKS? Is that the only way to do a fresh install of Win2k?

3. Why did the setup program load so many SCSI drivers? I don't have any SCSI devices.

4. The install interface is a lot prettier than Win98's.

5. Booting takes forever. So does shutting down. The startup splash screen is awesome. So is the default startup sound.

6. I installed the Detonator 7.52's first. As Windows was loading after the restart, my speakers started to screech. At first I suspected that there was a resource conflict with my sound card, but there wasn't. (Safemode took FOREVER to load). Installing the Via 4.28's fixed the problem.

7. That menu fading effect is really cool. Now I need to get rid of it.

8. Where the hell is everything?

9. HOLY CRAP! I CAN TWEAK EVERYTHING.

10. I don't have to restart whenever I change little network settings (like my ID)! I didn't even have to restart when I installed network card drivers! SWEET.

11. The system font looks a little different from Win98's...


That's about it. So far, I love it and I don't have that weird feeling like my computer is about to crash.
 
You are suppose to install the 4in1 before the video drivers. But you got it to work anyway.

Oh and the 4 setup disks? If you can boot from the CD, then there should be no problem. The driver load up is just a generic set of drivers loading for who knows what reason. Yeah, my 98SE setup did boot like that... but It does not justify that 2000 has more to offer.

And I am staying with 2000 now that ATi has a multimedia center 7.0 for it. 😀
 
igowerf,

You think you had it bad, I couldn't get my box to CD-boot either and I had to setup a RAID array. Can you say press F6 really really fast! I love W2K now. I had one freeze the other night. I think it was due to a problem with the scheduled tasks because it froze when they started...and that happened after the comp was up for a day and a half. Why don't you like the menu fades? It thought they were sweet lookin'! Ah well, no discerning taste. Just do the following:

Right click on your desktop and click properties
Click on the effects tab

change fade effect to scroll and voiala!



 
So far so good on Windows 2000. I got internet connection sharing up, but I can't see any of the shared folders on the other computer on my network. The other machine is running Win9SE. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Also, I think I just had my first BSOD. At least I think it was a BSOD. I was installing something when all of a sudden, a blue screen comes up. Little white letters at the top tell me that the installer tried to free memory that the program didn't have access to. When I hit the space bar, more letters came up and my system restarted. I had just installed WPCRSET so it might've had to do with my memory. Whatever, I still like Windows 2000 better.


ST4RCUTTER:
I found it already, but thanks for the tip.
 
If needed, Win2000 can be installed using a Win98 boot floppy, which also has "smartdrv.exe" on it. Run smartdrv.exe from dos prompt, then run i386/winnt.exe (not winnt32.exe) to set up Win2000.
 
It may take two minuets too boot Win2k verus 45 seconds in Win98 but I only have to reboot Win2k every other month verus three times a day in Win98.

Rain
 
WEIRD!!!

I INSTALLED WIN2K today for the first time!!

its awesome

Installed Win2K
installed SP1
installed Via 4in1s
installed IE 5.5
installed high encryption
installed nvidia drivers
installed creative drivers (no liveware, eek thats crap)
installed modem (not being used but whatever)
then loaded software for 6 hours straite
and now i am surfing the internet with bugged out eyes =)

anyways i have a few questions

where do you turn off Auto Run? god its annoying
where do i check to see if DMA is enabled?

 
2. NT derivitives have always had 4 startup disks. They are mainly needed to load device drivers, primarily for SCSI controllers. And to answer your question, that isn't the only way to do a fresh install of Win2k. If your BIOS supports booting from the CD-ROM (it should if it was made within the last three years), you can bypass having to make those boot disks and install directly from the CD (it's MUCH faster this way too). A startup menu should pop up when booting from the Win2k CD giving you that option.

3. NT is an OS aimed at business and professional users. Statistically, these users tend to own more SCSI and networking equipment than average home users. ALL of these SCSI drivers have to be loaded to ensure that most machines can even install Win2k. After all, without drivers, those hard drives WON'T work.

5. On the contrary, Win2k boots much faster on my machine than 98SE ever did.

7. That's simple. Just go into Display properties, click the Effects tab, and uncheck the "transition effects" box.

10. Isn't it great? That's one of my favorite things about NT. You can actually tweak a great deal of Win2k's settings without a reboot.


JavaMomma:

You actually have to hack registry to turn off AutoRun in Win2k (I can't remember where that registry entry is located off the top of my head though). You can also disable AutoRun by installing TweakUI into your Control Panel (you can get this at Tucows).

To check if DMA is enabled on you drives, go to Device Manger under "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" and double-click the appropriate channel (primary or secondary). A properties window will pop up. Click the Advanced Settings tab and you'll see the transfer mode settings for devices 0 and 1 on the channel. This where you can switch between DMA and PIO modes.

Hope that helps a bit.
 
ohh yeah forgot to say i installed it off the CD-Rom

was very fast

just set in the BIOS to boot of CD

worked like a charm i didnt have to make the floppies
I've installed WinNT 4 before & had to make them (only 3 with WinNT though)
 
I also love win2k, but I learned the hard way that you can boot from the cd and also that you can load your promise controller drivers before you install... Before I knew that you could boot from cd I would boot from the 4 disks and OMG that takes forever, then it would try to find my hard drive and give me some error, so I had to unplug my hard drive from ata 100 and plug it into the ata 66 slots, Lol those were some good times.
 
If it didn't make you reboot to install a network card then something is prolly broken.
See if you have any yellow exclamations in Device Manager.

Should boot way faster than 98 or 98se.

How much RAM do you have?
..duh, just found it, sorry.
 
Gee then gnognugs I must have installed over 100 broken Win2k installs. I have never yet got a reboot prompt after installing ethernet card drivers or after changing network settings. If your prompted to reboot then, most likely your install is prolly broken.

Rain
 
Hey those 4 setup disks really came in handy. I just finished installing W2K on a old Thinkpad 365XD P100 with 72 megs RAM and a 850 meg HD just to see if it would work. Funny thing is the internal CDROM was busted, I had an external PCMCIA CDROM drive but for some strange reason the IBM DOS PCCARD Service drivers just would not install. Anyway I booted up those 4 setup disks, it recognized EVERYTHING including my external CDROM. I then formatted my HD as 1 whole NTFS partition and 2 hrs. later I actually had W2K up and running and apparently it had drivers for everything on that laptop. I was impressed. And even my Linksys PCCARD NIC which gave me no end of trouble under W98 now works flawlessly under W2K.
 
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