Windows 2000 is a continuation of the Microsoft
Windows NT family of operating systems, replacing
Windows NT 4.0. Originally called Windows NT 5.0, then Windows NT 2000, Microsoft changed the name to Windows 2000 on 27 October 1998.
[16] It is also the first Windows version that has been released without a
code name, though Windows 2000
Service Pack 1 was codenamed "Asteroid"
[17] and Windows 2000 64-bit was codenamed "Janus"
[18] (not to be confused with
Windows 3.1, which had the same codename). The first beta for Windows 2000 was released in September 1997
[19] and several further betas followed until Beta 3 which was released on 29 April 1999.
[19] During development, there was a build for the
Alpha which was abandoned some time after RC1
[20] after
Compaq announced they had dropped support for
Windows NT on Alpha. From here, Microsoft issued three release candidates between July and November 1999, and finally released the operating system to partners on 12 December 1999.
[21] The public could buy the full version of Windows 2000 on 17 February 2000. Three days before this event, which Microsoft advertised as "a standard in reliability", a leaked memo from Microsoft reported on by Mary Jo Foley revealed that Windows 2000 had "over 63,000 potential known defects".
[22] After Foley's article was published, Microsoft
blacklisted her for a considerable time:
[23] InformationWeek summarized the release "our tests show the successor to NT 4.0 is everything we hoped it would be. Of course, it isn't perfect either."
[24] Wired News later described the results of the February launch as "lackluster".
[25] Novell criticized Microsoft's
Active Directory, the new directory service architecture as less scalable or reliable than its own
Novell Directory Services (NDS) alternative.
[26]
Windows 2000 was first planned to replace both
Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0. However, that changed later. Instead, an updated version of Windows 98 called Windows 98 Second Edition was released in 1999 and
Windows Me was released in late 2000.
[19] Close to the release of Windows 2000 Service Pack 1, Microsoft released Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, targeted at large-scale computing systems with support for 32 processors, on 29 September 2000.
On or shortly before 12 February 2004, "portions of the Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0
source code were illegally made available on the Internet".
[27] The source of the leak remains unannounced. Microsoft issued the following statement:
"Microsoft source code is both copyrighted and protected as a trade secret. As such, it is illegal to post it, make it available to others, download it or use it."
Despite the warnings, the archive containing the leaked code spread widely on the
file-sharing networks. On 16 February 2004, an
exploit "allegedly discovered by an individual studying the leaked source code"
[27] for certain versions of
Microsoft Internet Explorer was reported.
[edit] New and updated features
Windows 2000 introduced many of the new features of
Windows 98 and Windows 98 SE into the NT line,
[28] such as the
Windows Desktop Update,
[28] Internet Explorer 5, (
Internet Explorer 6 which came in 2001 is also available for Windows 2000)
[28] Outlook Express,
NetMeeting,
FAT32 support,
[29] Windows Driver Model,
[30] Internet Connection Sharing,
[28] Windows Media Player,
WebDAV support
[31] etc. Certain new features are common across all editions of Windows 2000, among them NTFS 3.0,
[9] the
Microsoft Management Console (MMC),
[32] UDF support, the
Encrypting File System (EFS),
[33] Logical Disk Manager,
[34] Image Color Management 2.0,
[35] support for
PostScript 3-based printers,
[35] OpenType (.OTF) and
Type 1 PostScript (.PFB) font support,
[35] the
Data protection API (DPAPI),
[36] an
LDAP/
Active Directory-enabled
Address Book,
[37] usability enhancements and multi-language and locale support. Windows 2000 also introduced
USB device class drivers for USB printers,
Mass storage class devices, and Remote
NDIS devices.
[38] Windows 2000 is also the first Windows version to support
hibernation at the operating system level (OS-controlled
ACPI S4 sleep state) unlike Windows 98 which required special drivers from the hardware manufacturer or driver developer.
[39]
A new capability designed to protect critical system files called
Windows File Protection was introduced. This protects critical Windows system files by preventing programs other than Microsoft's operating system update mechanisms such as the
Package Installer,
Windows Installer and other update components from modifying them.
[40] The
System File Checker utility provides users the ability to perform a manual scan the integrity of all protected system files, and optionally repair them, either by restoring from a cache stored in a separate "DLLCACHE" directory, or from the original install media.
Microsoft recognized that a
serious error or a stop error could cause problems for servers that needed to be constantly running and so provided a system setting that would allow the server to automatically reboot when a stop error occurred.
[41] Also included is an option to
dump any of the first 64
KB of memory to disk (the smallest amount of memory that is useful for
debugging purposes, also known as a minidump), a dump of only the kernel's memory, or a dump of the entire contents of memory to disk, as well as write that this event happened to the Windows 2000
event log.
[41] In order to improve performance on servers running Windows 2000, Microsoft gave administrators the choice of optimizing the operating system's memory and processor usage patterns for background services or for applications.
[42] Windows 2000 also introduced core system administration and management features as the
Windows Installer,
[43] Windows Management Instrumentation[44] and Event Tracing for Windows (ETW)
[45] into the operating system.
[edit] Plug and Play
The most notable improvement from
Windows NT 4.0 is the addition of Plug and Play with full
ACPI and
Windows Driver Model support. Similar to
Windows 9x, Windows 2000 supports automatic recognition of installed hardware, hardware resource allocation, loading of appropriate drivers, PnP APIs and device notification events.
[edit] Windows Explorer
Windows Explorer has been enhanced in several ways in Windows 2000. It is the first
Windows NT release to include
Active Desktop, first introduced as a part of
Internet Explorer 4.0 (specifically
Windows Desktop Update), and only pre-installed in
Windows 98 by that time.
[46] It allowed users to customize the way folders look and behave by using
HTML templates, having the
file extension HTT. This feature was abused by
computer viruses that employed malicious scripts,
Java applets, or
ActiveX controls in folder template files as their infection vector. Two such viruses are VBS/Roor-C
[47] and VBS.Redlof.a.
[48]
The "Web-style" folders view, with the left Explorer pane displaying details for the object currently selected, is turned on by default in Windows 2000. For certain file types, such as pictures and media files, the preview is also displayed in the left pane.
[49] Until the dedicated interactive preview pane appeared in
Windows Vista, Windows 2000 had been the only Windows release to feature an interactive media player as the previewer for sound and video files. However, such a previewer can be enabled in
Windows Me and
Windows XP through the use of third-party shell extensions, as the updated Windows Explorer allows for custom thumbnail previewers and
tooltip handlers. The default file tooltip displays file title, author, subject and comments;
[50] this metadata may be read from a special
NTFS stream, if the file is on an NTFS volume, or from an OLE
structured storage stream, if the file is a structured storage document. All
Microsoft Office documents since Office 4.0
[51] make use of
structured storage, so their metadata is displayable in the Windows 2000 Explorer default
tooltip.
File shortcuts can also store comments which are displayed as a tooltip when the mouse hovers over the shortcut. The shell introduces extensibility support through metadata handlers, icon overlay handlers and column handlers in Explorer
Details view.
[52]
A HTT file as it appears in Windows 2000
The right pane of Windows 2000 Explorer, which usually just lists files and folders, can also be customized. For example, the contents of the system folders aren't displayed by default, instead showing in the right pane a warning to the user that modifying the contents of the system folders could harm their computer. It's possible to define additional Explorer panes by using
DIV elements in folder template files
[46] Other Explorer UI elements that can be customized include columns in "Details" view, icon overlays, and search providers: the new DHTML-based search pane is integrated into Windows 2000 Explorer, unlike the separate search dialog found in all previous Explorer versions. This degree of customizability is new to Windows 2000; neither Windows 98 nor the Desktop Update could provide it.
[53] The
Indexing Service has also been integrated into the operating system and the search pane built into Explorer allows searching files indexed by its database.
[54]
[edit] NTFS 3.0
Windows 2000 supports
disk quotas, which can be set via the "Quota" tab found in the hard disk properties
dialog box.
Microsoft released the version 3.0 of NTFS
[9] (sometimes incorrectly called NTFS 5 in relation to the kernel version number) as part of Windows 2000; this introduced
disk quotas (provided by
QuotaAdvisor),
file-system-level encryption,
sparse files and
reparse points. Sparse files allow for the efficient storage of data sets that are very large yet contain many areas that only have zeros.
[55] Reparse points allow the
object manager to reset a file namespace lookup and let file system drivers implement changed functionality in a transparent manner.
[56] Reparse points are used to implement
volume mount points,
junctions,
Hierarchical Storage Management, Native
Structured Storage and
Single Instance Storage.
[56] Volume mount points and directory junctions allow for a file to be transparently referred from one file or directory location to another.
[edit] Encrypting File System
The Encrypting File System (EFS) introduced strong
file system-level
encryption to Windows. It allows any folder or drive on an NTFS volume to be encrypted transparently by the user.
[33] EFS works together with the EFS service, Microsoft's
CryptoAPI and the EFS File System
Runtime Library (FSRTL).
[57] To date, its encryption has not been compromised.
EFS works by encrypting a file with a bulk
symmetric key (also known as the File Encryption Key, or FEK), which is used because it takes less time to encrypt and decrypt large amounts of data than if an
asymmetric key cipher were used.
[57] The symmetric key used to encrypt the file is then encrypted with a
public key associated with the user who encrypted the file, and this encrypted data is stored in the header of the encrypted file. To decrypt the file, the file system uses the private key of the user to decrypt the symmetric key stored in the file header. It then uses the symmetric key to decrypt the file. Because this is done at the file system level, it is transparent to the user.
[58]
For a user losing access to their key, support for recovery agents that can decrypt files is built in to EFS. A Recovery Agent is a user who is authorized by a public key recovery certificate to decrypt files belonging to other users using a special
private key. By default, local administrators are
recovery agents however they can be customized using
Group Policy.
