Windows ME was the last gasp of the Windows 9x model. It came out seven months after Windows 2000, but failed miserably while Windows 2000 provided a nice upgrade from Windows 98, and a quick stepping stone to Windows XP, Microsoft's most popular and well received OS ever.
Or is Vista really Windows 2000? Win2k came out a year and a half before Windows XP and bridged the gap between 9x and XP, reworking the kernel and linking tightly to Active Directory, enabling Microsoft to kick the last chance of a Novell NetWare revival out the door.
Windows 2000 could be called a stopgap business operating system easing the market toward Windows XP. If so, I have to give credit to Microsoft. I still use Windows 2000 on an old laptop I use for presentations because there's only 256MB of RAM in that small, portable, Pentium III laptop. With Windows 2000, it works fine and does all I need.
So is Microsoft way clever and using Windows Vista like Windows 2000, to bridge to something much better? Or is Vista a giant mistake like Windows ME?
Time, and Microsoft's approach to Windows 7, will tell.
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Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325
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2000? Bridge?
Mr. Gaskin please go back and look at the geneology of Windows again. Windows 2000 was an upgrade from NT 4.0 not a bridge between 98 and XP. Like 4.0 and XP Windows is built on the NTFS file system not a piggy back GUI for DOS.Vista is the most secure Operating System Microsoft has put out to date. The issues the Operating System had are the same ones XP had in its first version. Driver compatiblity will always be an issue as long as the hardware manufactures lag behind development. This is true with any Windows or Linux product. For the most part Apple doesn't have this issue since it refuses to license any other company to build computers that uses the Apple OS.