Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional

I could write so much about this operating system that I'd still be going at it tomorrow and the next day, but since I can't spare the time to go into that much detail, let me just make a few key points about Windows 2000.

If you have enough people to look at and take advantage of all the features of Windows 2000, you will be able to reap the benefits immediately; and, although it is not something to be taken lightly, smaller organisations can still get a lot from Win2k. The only people who won't benefit that much will be home users.

The OS has been stable for me from the start (even on a beta release, several months before it was released to manufacture), and back then it was obvious that Windows 2000 provided just what I wanted to run my PC systems on.

This is the way that Client-Server systems should work. The client workstations can be controlled incredibly finely by system administrators, even to the extent that they can rebuild machines and install all their software without having to go near them (depending on having the right hardware and server infrastructure).

A lot of the control is provided by the Active Directory and Group Policies which mean that you can set options for groups of users, groups of computers, organisational units containing both of the above, and so much more. The list of policies that you can apply is so long that it'll take some time to decide exactly how you want to set everything, although we found that is many cases the defaults were just fine.

Support for plug and play is a big advantage over NT since you no longer have to spend time worrying about drivers, although your PCs will have to be a higher spec than they previously were. In fact, Win2k appears (for me) to answer all of the wishes you had for NT4, and gives you a better networking solution than could ever have been provided by Windows 9x.

In my organisation, the 7,000-odd PCs have been running a mad mix of every version of Windows, but now we don't have any need to run anything other than Windows 2000 (although the migration won't happen over night), and the advantages to every PC user we have will be huge, not to mention the advantages to those who have to support them.

If you have a network of Windows PCs then this is the operating system that you almost certainly should be using.