WIN 2K and stability of it

I have been running W2KPro since beta3 (currently running RC2) on my Compaq laptop.  In these four months not one crash! Nearly everything has worked as I expected.  Things that I found were broken in beta3 have all been fixed in RC2.

I also have NT4W on the laptop (my 'standard' build), this hasn't been booted for three months now.  I can't imagine having to go back to NT4.

I am in an NT4 domain, all the NT4 admin tools (or the W2K equivalents) work on W2KPro.

What have I lost...
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No COM port emulation for Infrared - IRDA only - so some old apps that talk to IR devices no longer work.  eg to my Palm3 and Nokia 6110.

QuickView for looking at DLLs.

What have I gained...
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Very little rebooting.

Out of the box (well off the CD) support for all laptop features incluing hot docking/undocking, hot periheral changes, hot network connection/disconnects.  And NO Compaq drivers required!

....
Overall from a personal point of view I'm sold on this new OS.  However the cost justification for a corporate upgrade is a little more tricky.

Mark

In all do respect.
I can really tell that you havent pushed your OS to the test. Try to do some configuration that involves harware and try to change every little thing you can change and wait and see what happens....eh he.
But sure...you are right. The Last version is much more stable than the previous. I hope they keep that trend.

Regards
Onehouse

Admittedly I haven't tried to break the OS I've just been a regular user.  I'll leave the 'lets try and break this SOAB' to our beta test team.

However it has coped with the laptop, docking, offline synchronised folders, mount points, multiple hard drives (hot added and removed), internal/external monitors, LS120 & DVD drives, internal V.90 WinModem, CD-RW, SCSI scanner, PCI and PCMCIA network cards without a single (OS) problem (plenty of application problems however, but to be fair they have all been on NT4 versions)

We also have two 4-way Xeon servers running W2K-AS, with fibre attached RAID storage in a cluster.  This too has been relatively painfree.

We have had certain problems with Active Directory (particularly replication issues), and with the initial installation on some platforms (seems to be related to resource conflicts on the whole).

Most of the bitching seems to be from peps who have a copy of Pro and complain 'cause it won't support their latest 3D mega video card with a 3D soundcard running a shoot 'em up game.  Business type use seems to be very stable - we have a whole team now running W2KPro as their day to day machines.

Anyway Huzar that's my experience, others will have had different experiences.

Mark

I have to agree with Carmine:

I have been using the Corporate Preview Program and most of the problems in NT4.0 dont come back in Win2K. Offcourse I havent been able to test it in a full network environment (currently only 2 servers and 5 workstations) but my first experience with 2000 is rather optimistic.
And yes, I have been installing the strangest and biggest hard and software. I could come up with in order to test Win2K's stability. I am not saying I had no problems at all but as far as I can remember the ones that did occur were to blame on the fact they werent supported by Win2K (yet).

To all,
I am looking at fairly specific commentaries, like the one carmine gave.  
I am not looking for an answer that says more or less" stability is bad."  I need examples of good and bad.
Best one gets the points.
And since you just have to describe as to your experience and not really reinvent or solve anything, I figure those are rather easy points.
Huzar

I've put it on 4 systems - 2 custom built systems (one very new dual Pentium II 350), one Pentium 233 with various frankenstein parts, a Dell 3200 Notebook, and a Dell PowerEdge 2300 server.  So far it's overall stability on these systems has been great.  The problems I've encountered have been with support for various hardware.  Here's what I've done so far:

Dual 350 - Started with Beta 3 Release Candidate 1 (Build 2000), later reformatted after something crashed and I couldn't ressurect the system with Beta 3 (final beta 3 - build 2031).  I've been running Beta 3 for about 2-3 months (shortly after it was released) and been very pleased.  It has not supported my 3COM 3c905b card or my Adaptec 2920 SCSI card (and in turn the Zip drive).  But I'm not currently concerned with that - I'm sure the final version will have these issues resolved.  I plugged a Connectix Color USB camera in and it found it immediately and win2k reports it as working properly but I'm assuming that the various software packages out there are unaware of how to talk to it as I've yet to get it to work and there is no software for it on the CD that came with it that would support win2k.  Also, running Netscape has crashed fairly often (something I had not previously had a problem with with Netscape).  And when it does, it's process remains running and cannot be terminated (access denied, even though I'm logged in as an administrator).  After a long time running the GUI has had a few problems, though nothing terribly significant that often.  For example, I use a little utility called "hideit" that hides applications and removes them from the task bar.  I also run the SETI at Home command line program and "hide it".  Sometimes, I've had a problem  where suddenly I start getting lines from that window appearing.  But again, this is a GUI issue which I would expect to be solved by the final release.  Further, I have NOT upgraded/reinstalled RC1 (build 2072) or higher on this machine.

On the PowerEdge 2300, I have been running a VPN server on that system and it's been up for about 2 weeks or more now without a problem, though aside from VPN, it gets very little use.

The Frankenstein'd Pentium 233 gets more use but with more generic apps.  Though it does have a scanner and 1502 SCSI card.  It has had few problems, if any, and been running fine, I believe under build 2031 for about 2-3 months now.

Lastly, the Dell notebook is a machine I have very little control over.  However, i have not heard any issues with it (and this is a user who would be letting me know)...

I find it perfectly stable.  Much more so than Win95 or Win98.  It has numerous advantages over NT4, especially with regards to desktop uses.  I've actually stuck my neck and reccomended it as perfectly stable for everyday use by an Is department.

any of you using win2k want to take a crack at another question? it's easy: all you have to do is check whether you can have an udma and an older drive on the same ide channel and still have the new one running as udma (all you have to do is see in the control panel whether it adjust the setting by channel or drive)
Huzar
P.S.  it 's question @ url
http://www.experts-exchange.com/jsp/qShow.jsp?ta=win2k&qid=10211655

Disregard the last comment, I have deleted the question due to no responses what so ever.
Anyways, I like the response and effort from both Carmine and Leew, so I will give 75 points each ( a little bit less the the whole question but more the half)... Carmine If you want to lock this question, Leew I will post a seperate one for you.
If you both could just give me any insight you had about the install process (I actually decided and ordered win2k beta to see how it works and to enjoy the features of it: Microsoft promised to sent the RC pack in about two weeks after the cd shipped.)
Huzar

Install just like NT4, it will either go in a breeze, or it'll stall at the 'Starting Windows' message (This seems to be the point it fails for most people).  I'm pretty sure that this is due to resource conflicts in the partial install.

If you have an ACPI compliant machine (post 1/1/99 ??) then if it fails at this point you can try pressing F6(?), and install as a standard PC.  Update to ACPI once W2K is loaded.

Mark

Thanks, I hope that everything is going to go smoothly.
Huzar