Product: Windows® 2000 Professional Operating System
Company: Microsoft Corporation
Website: http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000
List Price: $319.00 
Review By: Julien Jay

File System

Windows 2000, at least supports FAT32 file system. So it can be installed on FAT 32 and it will recognize all of your FAT 32 hard disks. NTFS 5 also comes in the box: it’s a brand new NT file system that adds some security enhancements (losing data is very difficult with this high secure file system) and it’s more faster than the FAT32. NTFS 5 will index your files and will secured the access due to its advanced encoded features. NTFS 5 also allows you to create, extend or mirroring your NTFS volumes without restarting your computer, it even logged all the changes and optimises the disk space’s allocation, etc. But your NTFS hard disks won’t be recognized by Windows 95/98/98SE if you use a dual boot. NTFS is reliable, but it is slower than FAT 32 format. However they are some problems with this new NTFS release: recent utilities like PowerQuest Partition Magic 5 doesn’t support NTFS5 for the moment also other programs like Antivirus, Defragmenter don’t recognize this file system.

Even if you’re free to use FAT32, if you want to use the new active directory service (used in intranet for MS Exchange server, for example) you’ll have to switch in NTFS. Windows 2000 surely supports the old good FAT 16 and NTFS file systems but it’s not really advised to use them. And for the first time ever, Windows NT includes a real defragmenter program!! In fact it’s a lighted release of DisKeeper.