Windows NT 2000

How to install and configure Windows 2000 (as tested on Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Professional final version).

Setup

1. Preparing to run Windows 2000 Setup

Before you begin, check that your system meets the minimum requirements for Windows 2000 (formerly known as Windows NT 5.0). A minimum of 64MB of RAM is required for Windows Server 2000; Windows 2000 Professional (formerly known as "NT 5.0 Workstation") will run -- slowly -- on a system with 32MB of RAM.

It is important to note that Windows 2000 does not support upgrading editions. For example, you cannot upgrade a Windows 2000 Server to Advanced Server or vice versa. To avoid reinstalling all your applications in the future, be sure to use the Windows 2000 edition that will accommodate the needs of your organization today and in the future.

You should have plenty of free disk space when attempting to upgrade an existing system. When upgrading to Windows 2000 Professional, for example, you'll need at least 330 MB of free disk space or about twice that much (557 MB is required, to be exact) for a new installation. See Microsoft's respective web pages for system requirements for other versions.

It is possible to boot from the CD, and/or, if desired, it is possible to upgrade by inserting the CD into a system running Windows 9x, Windows NT, a Windows 2000 beta 3 Release Candidate or a trial version of the final release. (Warning: if SMARTDRIVE is not enabled, the installation speed is greatly reduced -- and can take as long as ten hours!)

When the Windows 2000 CD-ROM is inserted, the autorun.exe (in the i386 directory) runs, and the installation procedure is initiated. The installer detects your current OS version and, if the version on the CD is newer, asks you if you would like to upgrade.

At this point, the install procedure varies depending on whether you elect to install the OS to a new directory, or upgrade an existing version of Windows. In the case of a fresh installation (such as you might see when installing Windows 2000 to a path other than your existing Windows directory), you must re-install your applications. (However, by choosing "New Installation," you can dual-boot a system with a previous version of Windows NT and/or other versions of Windows.)

Next, the obligatory License Agreement screen appears. There's also a step where Server administrators can select whether they want Windows 2000's License Manager -- an application that Microsoft hopes will keep users from running more copies of software than they have legal licenses for -- to be configured for server- or client-side licensing. At each step, you have Next and Back buttons to move from screen to screen.

Windows 2000 then lists special setup options, including Language Options (English, etc.) and Advanced Options (location of install directory, name of setup information file, etc.). If you are not upgrading an existing installation, you will also see a button that allows you to set Accessibility Options here.

On systems that have hardware components with drivers that are known to not be Windows 2000 compatible, you may be halted at this point with a message that one or more devices will be disabled if you continue. We were surprised to see that the Adaptec ASPI32 driver we had previously used to mount a CD-R drive on our desktop as a CD-ROM fell into this "unusable" category, as did a Hewlett-Packard 722C printer and Glint-based graphics adapter. All items had worked properly under NT 4.0.

Next, you are presented with the option to upgrade to the NT file system (NTFS). The setup screen observes that, while this option provides added file security, reliability and more efficient use of disk space, it should not be used if you are planning to use Windows NT with another operating system, such as MS-DOS, Windows 95 or Windows 98. In other words, don't convert the drive to NTFS if you want to be able to dual-boot Windows 9x or DOS.

When these choices have been made (most users will need only to accept the defaults by clicking "Next"), the installer copies the necessary files to your computer's drive. This typically takes several minutes, as the on-screen status bar will indicate.

When it is done, the computer will need to restart. You can choose to have it restart automatically, or, if you prefer, do this manually. When it restarts, a new item appears in the Boot Manager startup menu, followed by several (character-mode) screens that will be familiar to those who have run Microsoft's Setup programs before.

At this point, you may be surprised -- as we were, with over 500 MB of free disk space -- to see a message that "the partition you have chosen is too full to hold Windows NT." If this occurs, the system will search for existing Windows NT installations and offer to remove them to free up enough space to continue. Removing a Windows NT installation will not affect data files.

On the other hand, the system was unable to reformat a drive our test system had previously used to run Linux, even though Windows 2000's partition management tool allowed us to delete the existing Linux partitions and reassign all the disk space to NT. The format subsequently failed, forcing us to boot from a Windows 9x boot disk, reformat the hard drive, and begin afresh.

The installer then proceeds through the setup of Regional Settings, keyboard layouts and asks you to personalize the installation with your name and organization. It then uses this information as the basis of a network identity for the computer. You can change the name if you do not like the concatenated, all-upper-case version it cooks up. You are also asked to supply an administrative password. No password allows subsequent boots of Windows 2000 Professional to occur without a password prompt, much as it does in Windows 9x. Windows 2000 Server, however, will pause at the login screen in any event.

Next, you must setup your computer's Desktop Area and Colors. We were delighted that our Toshiba 320CT portable's 1024x600 panoramic display was automatically detected and accounted for here. Then, you set the date, time-zone and proceed to an area of great improvement in Windows 2000: the setup of Network Settings.

Network Settings
Windows 2000 Professional provides the ability to define custom network settings, of course, but it also provides a "typical setting" option that installs a Client for Microsoft Networking, File and Print Sharing for Microsoft Networks, and TCP/IP protocol with automatic addressing. That worked for us.

You can choose to make your computer a part of a workgroup or a domain. Ask your network admin which is the best choice. On a peer-to-peer network, we selected Workgroup; in an environment with a dedicated Server, we would enter the domain name of our network. The Server section, below, provides additional details.

When all these steps are done, setup copies files, saves the configuration and finally removes any temporary files it used. You're done!

Windows 2000 Server Setup
Windows 2000 Server has, as you might expect, several additional steps. Most notably, you are asked if you want to add or remove a number of components:

Certificate Server
Internet Information Services (IIS)
Message Queuing Services
Microsoft Indexing Services
Networking options
Remote Installation Services
Remote Storage Server
Terminal Services
Transaction Server
Windows Media Server

A short description of each service is provided on the setup screen, and further details are provided via a “Details” button. Oddly, we found that items in the Add/Remove Programs dialog can no longer be selected via keyboard shortcuts -- a real problem when your mouse isn't working in Safe Mode, as ours wasn't at one point.

Consult the Windows 2000 Server documentation or our separate report on Windows 2000 Server for more information on these setup choices.

Windows 2000 Server then proceeds with video setup and network configuration in a manner similar to that of Windows 2000 Professional.

Hibernate Mode
There is an option called "Hibernate" in the Power Options control panel. When selected, Windows 2000 sets aside an amount of disk space equal to the amount of RAM you have installed as a "disk snapshot" of your current configuration, including an image of all the programs currently running, and all the documents you have open. Thus, you can turn off a hibernating system and, when power is restored, the system will return to the exact state it was in before entering hibernation. This feature worked well in our tests. Not so successful was a feature that only appears by clicking a checkbox, also in Power Options, called "APM." It is supposed to set your system into a power-saving "Standby mode;" however, Windows complained that our ATI All in Wonder Pro card wasn't allowing the suspend function to operate. Presumably, a different graphics card might have solved this problem.

Speaking of the ATI All in Wonder... We could find no evidence that, via the built-in drivers, the All in Wonder is useful as a capture card, although the Multimedia control panel does list a number of ATI-specific codecs for WDM audio and video capture functions. There is no WebTV feature, such as that provided by Windows 98. ATI makes various multimedia, DVD-playback and capture drivers available on its website at www.ati.com.

Automatic System Recovery - maybe
We also, rather unwillingly, tested Windows 2000's ASR (Automatic System Recovery) feature. After installing a number of NT 4.0 drivers, we managed to get the OS into a state in which it wouldn't boot properly in any mode other than safe mode or debug mode. (Both options are available by pressing F8 at the boot menu.). Thus, the ASR option, available from the Setup menu on the installation disk, seemed like a good plan.

Sad to say, but ASR didn't work. A blue screen of death, with a "page fault in nonpaged area" message was all Windows 2000 produced for our efforts.

Printer Settings
If there is an area of Windows 2000 that looked especially weak upon its release, it had to be printer compatibility. We had no luck trying to configure either an Epson Stylus Color 740 or a Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 722C back in Y2K. In both cases, Windows 2000 lacked native drivers and, worse, failed to work properly after we installed NT4 drivers. Windows 98 drivers didn't work either, and we were unable to define a "lower common denominator" driver. Fortunately, these problems have since been resolved with driver updates. The lesson here is: you'll probably need new drivers if you are upgrading your OS.

Need Drivers?
A large number of Windows 2000 compatibility reports and workarounds are available at http://www.ntcompatible.com.

Uninstalling Windows NT
If you already have Windows NT or Windows 2000 installed on your drive and want to install Windows 98 instead, there is a easy way to uninstall Windows NT/Windows 2000 without reformatting the hard disk. The most complete description we've seen is at http://www.j51.com/~sshay/win95/unwinnt.html.

Updates to this article are posted below
Uninstalling Windows NT/2000. Details above.
May 28, 2000: added details on (lack of) downgrade capability, ATI, Adaptec links. Removed reference to note that dual-booting Windows 98SE and Win2000 is currently not supported. This issue has been fixed.
Feb.3, 2000: updated test links with build 2195 [final] results; added note regarding Adaptec patch.

Windows 2000 compatibility information
As you might expect, many third-party hardware companies are hard at work upgrading their products for compatibility with Windows 2000. When we first started testing Windows 2000, we discovered issues with a number of Windows NT 4.0-compatible devices, drivers and programs. Here are a few of the items that caused us problems under Windows 2000 beta 2. Most or all of these issues have subsequently been addressed.

Adaptec EasyCD Creator 3.01D - blue screen of death (BSOD) upon restart. (A patch is, however, available at www.adaptec.com. See www.ntcompatible.com for details)
Adaptec 1502 SCSI interface (IRQ 9)
Adaptec 1522 SCSI interface (IRQ 9)
Epson Stylus Color 740
Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 722C
Glint-based graphics adapter
Diamond Viper 550 (TNT-based) graphics adapter (despite a few reports we've read to the contrary)
Mouse/Program removal problems in Safe Mode.

See our separate pages of beta 3 tests and build 2195 [final] tests for more test results, and refer to www.ntcompatible.com for a comprehensive list of compatible programs and devices.

For Further Reading:

Windows 2000 Orientation Guide
Microsoft Windows 2000 "Recommended Hardware" site

IT Library

The Techno Zone

User Account

Windows NT 2000

Setup

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