If you've grown accustomed to rebooting your PC every few hours, you'll be shocked by the smooth operation of W2K - measured in days or weeks, not hours. Because of memory protection, badly behaved programs cannot lock up the rest of your system and the dreaded 'Blue Screen of Death' is relatively unknown with Windows 2000. If your PC is fairly new, setting up Windows 2000 is easy. A clean install takes an hour or less. Upgrading over Windows 95 or 98 takes longer because of the extensive compatibility checks of the Setup program.
Security is much improved.
Encrypted passwords are sent over a network instead of clear text. There is an option for the Encrypting File System that scrambles every file on your hard disk to make it thief proof. For those who don't trust passwords there is support for 'smart' cards andother physical identification systems to prevent access by unauthorised users. Compatibility Microsoft's Hardware Compatibility List is impressively long, so the Windows NT driver headaches should be a thing of the past. We have all experienced previous versions of Windows haphazardly allowing any application to overwrite crucial system DLL files.