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
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]
[edit] NTFS 3.0
Main article: NTFS
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
Main article: 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.
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