Windows 2000 Professional Basics

PART I Windows 2000 Professional Basics Learn To: • Install Windows 2000 Professional • Install and organize COPYRIGHTEDremove MATERIAL programs • Add a local and a network printer CHAPTER 1 Introducing Windows 2000 Professional FEATURING: Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Server: Which is which? 4 What’s new in Windows 2000 Professional? 8 What’s not in Windows 2000 Professional? 16 Why choose Windows 2000 Professional over Windows 98? 17 How is Windows 2000 Professional different from other operating systems? 25 What are the features of Windows 2000 Professional architecture? 27 Weaknesses of Windows 2000 Professional 31 Since the advent of the personal computer, users have wanted three things in an operating system: power, stability, and usability. Windows 2000 Professional has all these and more in abundance. Since its inception in 1993, Windows NT has featured an indefatigable 32-bit architecture, complete with built-in networking and the capa- bility to run almost every piece of Windows software on the market. Windows 2000 Professional now includes an interface, which has evolved from the NT 4 Explorer shell and is even easier to use. NOTE Windows 2000 Professional is actually version 5 of Windows NT Workstation. Throughout the book, I make many references to NT in describing Windows 2000. The name change was a sign of the convergence of the Windows product lines. What does all this mean to the consumer, the person sitting at a desk 52 weeks a year who just wants to be a productive computer user? It means a lot. It means a fast, up-to-date operating system with a slew of advanced features that ensure the computer will almost never crash. It means an operating system that can host the emerging mul- titude of 32-bit software applications, some of which offer amazing facilities for professional audio and video recording, editing, and broadcasting. It means a new interface, which gives users tremendous control over how the system performs its tasks and how it maintains its connections to peripherals and to other computers. In this chapter, I’ll give you an overview of Windows 2000 Professional: what’s new, what’s different, and what’s under the hood. I’ll compare Windows 2000 Profes- sional to other operating systems you may be familiar with and emphasize compari- sons between Windows 2000 Professional and previous versions of Windows. In later chapters, I’ll expand on most of the topics I’ll introduce in this chapter, but you’ll find a lot here to whet your appetite. Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Server: Which Is Which? The two basic “flavors” of Windows 2000 are Professional and Server. It might be easier to think of Windows 2000 Server as the big brother of Windows 2000 Professional; they’re from the same family but a little different in size and purpose. Both versions of Windows 2000 are solid, 32-bit operating systems, with C2 Level security and built-in networking. Both feature the Windows 2000 interface. Windows 2000 Professional is an operating system designed for corporate and high-end users who want a robust and THE ROAD TO WINDOWS 2000 PROFESSIONAL 5 powerful operating environment. Windows 2000 Server does everything that Win- PART dows 2000 Professional does and adds a comprehensive set of tools for managing and I administering a network. It is designed to run on a network file server or application server. There are also additional versions of Windows 2000 Server intended for more specialized environments, such as cluster servers and data warehousing. For more information on these versions, see my book Mastering Windows 2000 Server (Sybex). Everything that I discuss in this book is relevant for both flavors of Windows 2000, but I don’t discuss the advanced networking administration features found in Win- dows 2000 Server. (Not to worry, though, networkers: in Part III of this book I do cover the administration features that let you manage the built-in networking capabilities of Windows 2000 Professional.) Windows 2000 Professional Basics The Road to Windows 2000 Professional For many years people believed that microcomputer operating systems and mainframe operating systems were totally different entities, as different as bicycles and airliners. In the case of bikes and airliners, most of us would say, “Sure, they’re both forms of transportation, but the similarity ends there.” It’s true. Microcomputer operating systems mainly ended up being launching pads for personal productivity tools such as word processors, drawing packages, e-mail, spreadsheets, and simple databases, as well as games. Mainframes, which make truly awful platforms for word processing (ask any- one who’s ever tried to run the Unix version of WordPerfect or IBM’s DisplayWrite/ 370), mainly ended up being the “data warehouses” of large corporations. Because mainframe systems generally operate in well-managed, centrally adminis- tered, and very fault-tolerant environments, huge mission-critical database programs have found a home on them. The IRS keeps its “master file” on every U.S. citizen in a building full of huge mainframes in Martinsburg, West Virginia. The IRS must run a program to examine the master file every day—all 300+ million records of it—and that file is so valuable that parts of it are backed up continuously. Running that application on a few dozen Pentium Pros under Windows is hard to imagine, isn’t it? (Try explain- ing to the president that we weren’t able to issue refunds this year because the master file GPFed.) But think about it: Why doesn’t the IRS do its work on PCs? PCs are slower than mainframes, certainly, but by a smaller and smaller margin with every machine gener- ation. No, the main reason is that corporate information technology (IT) managers don’t trust PC software, and with good reason. PC users assume and take for granted the existence of bugs in the software we buy. It’s just a fact of computer life. Our accep- tance is somewhat odd, though, when you think about it. Consistent low quality is almost unheard of in the rest of the manufacturing world. If one in a thousand Big Macs gave you food poisoning, would you still frequent McDonald’s? Probably not. If 6 CHAPTER 1 • INTRODUCING WINDOWS 2000 PROFESSIONAL automobiles have manufacturing defects, do you meekly accept the answer, “Well, yes, it is a problem, but it’s not a big one. We’ll fix it in the next model.” Nope. In fact, in most areas of commerce you usually don’t need to worry about the issue of quality because laws protect consumers from shoddy products in most fields. Why don’t PC vendors work harder to produce high-quality, never-failing software? Well, some have; IBM’s Personal Editor was one example of an essentially flawless piece of software. Operating systems haven’t been quite as lucky, though; you’d pretty much need a CD-ROM to hold the list of known Windows 3.x bugs. The Beginnings The top people at Microsoft knew that they were vulnerable on a very key point: all their products ran on Intel x86 hardware, meaning the 8088, 80286, 80386, 80486, and eventually Pentium and Pentium Pro processors and beyond. Microsoft’s fortunes, then, rode on the Intel horse, and at that time the Intel horse seemed the right one to back. But what about the future? Who could know what processor would be dominant in 10 years? Microsoft wanted to know that it would be on top no matter what processor the marketplace chose, so it needed an architecture-independent operating system. Building an Architecture-Independent Operating System Architecture-independent doesn’t mean that the product works as well in a Victorian house as it does in a Bauhaus office. Architecture-independent means that it’s built so that it can be modified fairly easily to work on a different processor. All of Microsoft’s operating systems up to 1989 were firmly Intel entrenched, and porting any of them to another processor would have been difficult. (For example, IBM was forced to agree that portability was a problem when it announced that it had stopped work on a version of OS/2 for its PowerPC processor, a CPU of non-Intel architecture.) A piece of software can easily become dependent on a particular processor because the writers of the operating system must become intimately familiar with the processor’s strengths and weaknesses. Consequently, those strengths and weaknesses inevi- tably color a developer’s sense of what’s necessary and unnecessary for an operating system. For example, if you build an operating system on top of a 16-bit processor, you’re probably going to make the operating system a 16-bit operating system. If the processor handles memory in chunks (pages is the exact word) of 4KB, as the Intel processors do, the operating system’s pages will probably turn out to be 4KB as well. So converting the operating system to a machine with 1MB pages involves massive code rewriting unless the operating system is designed with flexible page sizes in mind. THE ROAD TO WINDOWS 2000 PROFESSIONAL 7 Building an architecture-independent operating system might have been too diffi- PART cult a task for Microsoft’s development staff, but as luck would have it, a team of top- I flight mainframe operating system designers became available in 1989. A group of former Digital Equipment Corporation programmers, led by a man named Dave Cutler, set up shop at Microsoft, promising to build the operating system of Microsoft’s future. Influenced partly by an operating system called MACH, a Unix implementation created at Carnegie Mellon University, Cutler’s team used a design approach that attempted to isolate all the processor-specific parts of the operating system into a single area called the microkernel.

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