Windows 2000 has hit the shelves, and many computer users will be wondering whether the time has come to upgrade. Before you dash out to spend a fortune on the latest code from Redmond, however, pause to consider whether Bill Gates’s latest offering is really for you.
Firstly, the hype around this release has largely obscured the fact that Windows 2000 is not a successor to Windows 98, but to Windows NT 4.0. There are four versions: Professional, Server, Advanced Server and Datacenter Server.
What all that means is it’s not focused on the needs of the individual user, but on running networks or powerful business applications – and carries an appropriate price tag. Windows 2000 Professional will cost in the region of R800. If you’re not the kind of person who knows precisely why you need Windows 2000, you probably don’t need it.
If you are dead keen on some kind of an upgrade, wait a couple of months for Windows Me, or Millennium Edition, which is the upgrade for Windows 98. Home users, especially keen game players, will probably run into trouble with hardware and software incompatibilities if they install Windows 2000. While some games may run better, many will not run at all. The minimum requirements are 128 megabytes of memory and a Pentium-133.
The good news is that all preliminary reports suggest that Microsoft may truly have produced the goods this time. Windows 2000 appears to be far more stable and secure than its predecessors. In installation, it reads all the settings from its predecessors, and supports plug and play far better than did NT. It offers strong corporate Internet technology management features, such as remote installation of software – if the remote desktop also runs Windows 2000. And security has been beefed up from Windows NT.
But for the meantime, it’s worth remembering that Microsoft is in the habit of producing “service packs” – bug fixes to you and me – shortly after releasing new software. Already, two patches have been released to solve hardware compatibility problems. Avoid being a guinea pig and wait a while for others to work out the glitches.
For an initial outlay of up to $2E500, Genetic Savings and Clone, based in College Station, Texas, promises bereaved animal- lovers the prospect of the next best thing to kitty living for ever.
The firm takes DNA samples from old or dying dogs and cats and stores them in anticipation of the day when they can be cloned – within a year, it seems.
“It’s a major scientific challenge, but the team is 90% there,” said Mark Westhusin, the Texas A&M University veterinary physiologist heading the project. The initial price might be hundreds of thousands of dollars, falling after three years to $25E000.
Rare, the United Kingdom’s most respected games developer, has dropped the Game Boy Camera feature from its long-awaited Nintendo 64 game, Perfect Dark. But not because the technology was too difficult: the company says it wants “to avoid any controversy during the game’s release”.
The original idea was to enable players to superimpose faces on game characters. Second thoughts may have been prompted by the idea that kids could put, for example, their teachers’ faces on characters and frag them.