Review by Mary Jo Sminkey

I got tired of the Win98 crashes, so decided to buy and install this. I do web design for a living and so am commonly running a web server locally on my machine, as well as an application server, editor, browser, email, etc. all at the same time. Lockups and crashes were pretty common. What a difference W2K has made! I did a complete reinstall, something that I definitely recommend if at all possible. Most computers these days can boot from the CD, which makes this infinitely more easy to do than in the past. Installation went flawlessly for me…then I ran into the problems others have mentioned regarding drivers and various programs not working. It’s not as bad as you might think though. At this point, the OS has been out long enough that most manufacturers are providing drivers. The only one I ran into a problem with was my CD-R driver software, there was no free upgrade from Adaptec, so I was stuck paying $100 to get something that worked. 1 star out of 5 to them for their lack of providing a decent option for W2K users. Other than that, I definitely recommend this upgrade. In addition to stability, it has a lot of nice features and improvements that make the Windows experience even better. Only main complaint I have is the price. To those who still think Microsoft is not a monopoly, I would point to this product as a perfect example of how the price for their upgrades keeps going up, while other software keeps going down. If you’re not having any problems with Win 98, you may want to really consider whether this upgrade is worth the price.