IP: I know I will receive poison pen letters for this one but -- some comments re Windows 2000

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

I have been experimenting with Windows 2000 now for the past months. I first tried Windows 2000 (W2K) as soon as it was 
released via the developers distribution and then tried RC1 and RC2 and am waiting for RC3.

In all cases I used  it on my Sony 505 and Z505 machines. It should be noted that Sony does not support either NT or 
W2K and thus it was winging it.

I have been running W2K RC2 on my Z505RX now for roughly a month. I installed it on the Z505 mainly in desperation over 
the Windows 98 that Sony supplied. It refused to enter the suspend or hibernate mode with any reliability. For a 
notebook that is the kiss of death. Finally after scanning  all the news files I decided to bite (or is it byte) the 
bullet and install w2k. 

It installed very cleanly, maybe the cleanest of all the MS products I have ever used. It found mostly all the built in 
plug and play,aka plug and pray,  devices and properly installed them except for the ilink and the modem. The ilink is 
due to the lack of a driver for it and the modem due to to a problem with the ini file that describes the modem -- 
seems it was set for some other nation and had a strange idea re tones . An unnamed MS employee sent me a fix for that 
and away I went.

All the applications I use work on w2k except for PGP commercial -- it locks up the keyboard in such a manner that I 
cannot suspend or hibernate (the free pgp at mit works like a charm). I also wish I had Sony's power panel but I cannot 
find any NT version on any web site I can find.

So how does w2k perform. To date it just runs and runs. No crashes, no lockups, no pain. It makes one ask why it took 
so long to get a decent product like this out but that may be a different message at another time.

Certainly I am not a public MS fan -- ask the judge, but aside from those issues whoever shepherded w2k into the 
product I am using deserves a big pat on the head and whoever did Windows98 a pat on someplace else (much harder),

Dave