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So far, I've upgraded 2 of my personal machines to Windows 2000, with a 50% success rate. It took me a long time to get around to to upgrading, because I had other business and personal priorities. IOW, Windows NT was working fine on my laptop, and I could tolerate my Windows 98 desktop. Eventually, however, OS decay set in on both machines. I don't remember where I first heard the term 'OS decay', but it refers to the phenomenon of Windows systems (at least versions current as of this writing) deteriorating over time. OS decay is especially prevalent in the machine of people who like to load, test, and/or develop software. When OS decay sets in, the most time-effective cure is a fresh installation of the operating system. It afflicted two of my systems to the point of pain - where system instability and sluggishness are more annoying than reloading the OS and application programs. On my NT 4.0WS laptop, I had some drive space, so I copied the Windows 2000 CD to the hard drive and installed from there. That way, I won't be caught without the CD somewhere (most likely during a presentation :-)). Incidentally, Office 2000 can be installed the same way. I installed it into a seperate directory (a fresh installation instead of an upgrade). It took a while to install, but it worked. I could now boot to either my old Win NT setup, complete with all my apps, or Win 2K. Before I re-installed my core apps in Win 2K, I renamed the "Program files" directory (which was entirely apps installed under Windows NT). I then installed my core apps, and because I used the same "My Documents" directory, my data was still there. If I have to go back to Win NT for some reason, I can rename the "Program Files" directory to get everything back. When I'm sure I'll no longer need to go back, I'll blow away the Window NT version of the "Program Files" directory. (Update - this has happened. No need to go back.) Windows 2000 is much more stable, and noticeably (although not remarkably) faster. Overall, a nice improvement, but I can still make the wheels come off once in a while :-). The other story of my Windows 98 machine is funny. I used the technique described above. When I ran the setup program, I answered a few questions and it chugged a while, then rebooted. When it rebooted, it came up with the Windows 2000 equivalent of the Blue Screen of Death (BSoD). It told me to press a key to give it another try, so I did. It rebooted again, and said that I had a hardware problem. That's not terribly surprising, because I've got a hard drive/BIOS combination that requires a special driver, a SCSI card for my scanner, a Voodoo 3000, an extra special high-speed serial port, and other such hardware. All of it is mix-and-match, but it is name-brand stuff. Anyway, I couldn't get Win 2K to work, but it still came up with the menu allowing me to choose Windows 98, so all was well in the world. Well, almost all. Every time I rebooted, I had to choose Win 98 manually or Win 2K would try to start, resulting in the BSoD. This meant no automated or remote reboots. I couldn't boot Windows 2000, and I couldn't find a way in Window 98 to let me change the boot menu selection. Ah well, it was an annoyance I guess I could live with. However, I have Norton AntiVirus scheduled to run once a week. When it ran, it detected the modified boot sector and asked me if I wanted to restore a good version. I said yes, and BAM!, the next time I rebooted, the broken boot menu was gone and Windows 98 booted as normal. So Norton Antivirus fixed my machine after a failed Windows 2000 install. It makes sense, but it sounds funny anyway! :-)
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