InformationWeek

By the time Enfield counted the show of hands, he had a good cross-section of 2,000 employees in 26 countries who were willing to switch their notebooks to the new operating system. Eventually, all of the company's 40,000 Dell Computer and IBM notebooks, as well as another 60,000 desktop PCs, will be ported to Windows 2000. But Motorola wanted to begin with a subset of systems to make sure the new operating system functioned well with the company's existing applications, says Enfield, the lead analyst for desktop architecture in Motorola's desktop solutions group.

Enfield's group, which is responsible for notebook and desktop PC management, installed the new operating system on a mix of Dell Latitude CPx notebooks and IBM 560, 570, 600, and 770 ThinkPads. The team quickly discovered that the benefits of migrating notebooks from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 Professional far outweighed the challenges, which included training IT staff on the operating system and performing application compatibility tests.

Enfield cites Windows 2000's increased reliability and productivity, as well as better manageability, as primary reasons for diving headfirst into a notebook retrofitting project. Enfield and his team have recorded fewer crashes and other glitches than they've seen with previous Windows operating systems. Although he hasn't collected any hard metrics, Enfield has noticed that he can go several weeks without being forced to reboot his notebook--something he couldn't do before, he says.

Studies bear out Enfield's findings. Giga Information Group, an IT consulting firm, says nine of 10 Windows 2000 Professional users find Windows 2000 more reliable than previous Windows operating systems. About 75% of the more than 1,000 users surveyed say it crashes far less frequently and delivers two to 10 times better reliability than Windows NT 4.0.

Decreasing downtime and wait time is important for mobile employees, and many say Windows 2000 has gone a long way toward addressing these issues. In addition to Smart Battery, which provides a detailed snapshot of notebook battery life and settings, the operating system offers the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface, which lets users power down to hibernate or standby mode without closing applications and get back up in less than a minute to the place they left off. In previous versions of Windows, waking up a notebook could take a few minutes, even with power-management capabilities.

Unlike other earlier versions of Windows, notebook power-management features under Windows 2000 actually work, says Cath Evans, technical project manager for Windows 2000 at Eastman Chemical Co., an international chemical company in Kingsport, Tenn. Eastman Chemical is migrating about 2,700 Dell notebooks and 9,000 desktop PCs from Windows 95 to Windows 2000.

"We've never enabled BIOS or operating-system power-management features in the past because we just didn't consider them fail-safe," Evans says. Older Windows systems with these features occasionally suspended operations for no reason, she says, causing a loss of hardware or monitor functionality. "But in Windows 2000, these features are stable and help sell Win2000 to our notebook users. We don't want to deploy anything that isn't solid."

Joe Cirra, assistant VP in the MIS division of Mellon Financial Corp., is spearheading efforts to standardize all of that company's 2,000 IBM ThinkPads and approximately 18,000 desktop PCs on Windows 2000 by early next year. During the pilot test, which involved 20 IBM ThinkPads, Cirra says he has been pleasantly surprised by the operating system's performance. "It's just a much better mobile platform for our people on the road," he says. Cirra says it routinely takes Mellon Financial salespeople about five minutes to wake their notebooks from sleep mode under NT 4.0, wasting customers' time. But with the hibernation and standby features embedded in Windows 2000, Mellon Financial users can more efficiently access their data--and thus close the deal more quickly.

Not that it's all been smooth. To truly support Windows 2000--taking advantage of Advanced Configuration and Power Interface and putting an end to resource conflict issues and PCs stalling after installs--Mellon needed to upgrade the BIOS in its IBM ThinkPads to the latest available version.

Enfield had similar problems with the BIOS on Motorola's Dell notebooks and ACPI compatibility. "You wind up getting erratic behavior, especially when you undock and dock if the BIOS isn't up there," he says. In addition to the BIOS's lack of support for ACPI, Enfield also said Motorola employees wound up with blue screens when hot-docking, system lockups, and disappearing mouse pointers. But Enfield says Dell is working on the issue, and any remaining BIOS concerns will be resolved soon.

Power management has been a real headache under Windows NT 4.0, says Diane Wimmer, manager of computer engineering at PeopleSoft Inc. in Pleasanton, Calif. Because NT doesn't have a solid power-management strategy for notebooks, "we had to work with our vendor to try to jury-rig it," she says. PeopleSoft has a notebook fleet of about 10,000, split between Toshiba Tecra 8100 and Toshiba Portege units. To satisfy PeopleSoft, Toshiba provided the company with additional software to emulate power management. The strategy worked, but required quite a bit of customization to work with PeopleSoft's automated build pro-cess. "Every time we changed hardware [on a system], we had to redo the fiddling. In the end, Windows 2000 eliminated the problem," she says.

Windows 2000 also provides several features designed to let the mobile user work more efficiently anywhere and at any time. Chief among these features is the Synchronization Manager, which lets notebook users copy files from a server for offline use and even navigate and browse shared folders and mapped network drives offline. The Synchronization Manager synchronizes the folders and files when the user reconnects to the network, checking the date and time stamps on all versions, automatically offering the user choices to handle potential conflicts, and preventing unwanted overwriting or duplication.

Although there was a similar function in Windows 95 and 98 called Briefcase, it was difficult for people to use, says Jay Goldstein, group product manager for Windows 2000 Professional at Microsoft. This system is more automated and intuitive to use, and allows power users to fine-tune how and when it works, he says. In essence, the utility combines offline Web pages with offline files and folders through one interface, he explains.

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