Installing Windows 2000
WINDOWS-2000 REQUIRES A MORE POWERFUL COMPUTER.A Microsoft recommends at least 64 meg RAM, and Intel recommends at least a 600 megahertz processor. I recommend at least a Pentium-2 or K6-2 at 350 megahertz or more, but you can probably get by reasonably with a Pentium-200 or so with 64 MB of RAM. The ABSOLUTE minimun is a Pentium-133 with 32 MB of RAM. If you're a power freak, consider an AMD Athlon board. If you have the equipment I recommend, you'll probably have a system that can boot off the CD-ROM. Just set the BIOS to boot the CDROM, let Setup run and when it restarts the computer, reset the BIOS to boot either "C" or "A then C" and you're all set.

If your computer has no way of booting the CDROM, you can try an over the network installation which will usually require pre-installation of another OS. OR you can execute "winnt" from the i386 directory of the Windows-2000 disc. OR if you are already in 95, 98 or NT4, you can put in the CDROM and you should get a message stating that the CD contains a newer version of Windows. Answer "YES" to upgrade

An important caution is that if you use NT4 and wish to continue to use it on a multiple boot system you MUST either use the FAT-16 file system on your NT volume OR apply service pack 4 or higher BEFORE installing 2000. Otherwise 2000 will make your files unreadable by NT. This information is official and from Microsoft.

The command winnt /ox to make three bootdisks is no longer supported in 2000. To create Setup startup disks, the command is now:
d:\bootdisk\Makeboot.exe a: (where d: is the letter of the CDROM drive and a: is the floppy)

If you have hardware issues such as the need to add a new SCSI driver, the CDROM boot install now gives you the option to add drivers BEFORE it tries to detect hardware.

WINDOWS-2000 will detect most Plug-and-Play devices, and a lot of SCSI adapters that NT4 couldn't.

Windows-2000 CAN be installed on a computer whose boot partition is FAT32 (typical with Win-98 dual-boots) and has overcome the bug of NT4 which prevented its installation with a starting point past the 4 GB mark.

The final release has fixed a major bug of the beta -- inability to detect non-PNP modems (such as the US Robotics Faxmodem with jumpers set to non-PNP, such as is recommended for NT4.)

The major issue with the released version is that much software had to be rewritten, especially in the area of CD recording.