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	Win2000's new Installer monitors your system whenever a program is installed, and prevents critical files from being overwritten.

Advanced Features
Win2000's loaded with new technologies -- not just new to Windows 2000, but new to Windows, period. All of the features listed below are exclusive to Win2000, although versions of a couple of them -- such as the Installer -- may be evident in Windows "Millennium" (the next upgrade to Windows 98), which is planned for late in 2000.

New features found in Windows 2000 Pro, Server, and Advanced Server: Installer. Win2000 may finally put an end to installer headaches and the syndrome referred to by many as DLL Hell, thanks to some new installation features, including a standard file-package format and installation service, and extensions that allow a damaged Win2000 software product to be repaired rather than reinstalled from scratch. Dynamic Partitions. If you're tired of running out of space on a partition when you know there's more room to spare on that drive, Dynamic Partition and Dynamic Disk let you add space to an existing partition on the fly. Safe Mode Boot and Command Console. Like Windows 98, a malfunctioning Windows 2000 installation can be booted into "Safe Mode" to allow a badly-behaved third-party driver to be removed or deactivated. Also, Windows 2000 can now be booted in a command-line-only mode for even more intricate work, such as recovering files on a damaged volume.

New features that require or are part of Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server: IntelliMirror. IntelliMirror allows a user's data, application settings and documents to follow them wherever they may log in on a Win2000 domain -- both on and offline. Active Directory. One of the most widely-touted new server-level features, Active Directory lets you consolidate Internet-standards-based directory information into one big DNS-driven database. This includes files, services, databases, Web pages, host connections -- you name it. Distributed File System. Also known as DFS, this allows Windows 2000 servers to take disparate directories in multiple machines and present them to users as a single directory tree. Terminal Services. A standard feature in Windows 2000 Server is Terminal Services, now no longer a separate edition of Windows, but rolled into Win2000 as an add-on. Terminal Services grants remote users the ability to log in through a networked client and get access to the same kind of graphical desktop they would get if they logged in locally, among many other features.

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Win2000 makes working with multiple network interfaces easy. Everything from a LAN connection to dial-ups to VPNs are treated as virtual connections you turn on or off at will.

New Networking
Win2000 deals with networking far more flexibly than WinNT or Win98. In WinNT, your network connection was pretty rigidly set up. If you wanted to change network settings or hardware, you had to edit your network settings and reboot. In fact, the whole networking system seems to have been rewritten to take advantage of the various ways that one networks. Think of it as Dial-Up Networking on steroids: everything, including LAN connections, VPN links, and dial-ups, are treated as connections that can be edited, disconnected, switched around, and plugged back in at will (most of the time) without having to reboot! This puts a greater range of hardware and protocols at your disposal.

Power Management

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	On a notebook PC, check to make sure Power Management is activated on the "APM" tab of the Power Options Control Panel.

Power management isn't just for notebooks anymore. All desktop machines shipped today have many advanced power-management features that go beyond simply blanking the screen or spinning down the hard drives. Hibernation allows the contents of system RAM to be written to a reserved area of the hard drive, so the machine can be powered completely off and then restored exactly as the user last left it. Network adapters from Intel, for instance, feature a "Wake on LAN" option that can trigger a machine to come out of a sleep state when it's contacted via network. Win2000 supports these features from the ground up, now. It even does hibernation on machines that don't have direct BIOS support for it. NT's connectivity for UPS modules has also been rolled into the Power Management features, and has been made even more robust, thanks to the efforts of American Power Conversion.

We tested with a variety of hardware, including an older model 233MHz ThinkPad. The older APM power management interface isn't enabled by default in Windows 2000, but you'll want to turn it on unless you always run on AC power or don't mind burning through batteries in a matter of minutes. Fortunately, the ThinkPad seems to have an APM implementation that Windows 2000 can work with; after turning on APM (see screenshot), Win2000 was able to work with the ThinkPad on power management without problems. That's a pretty important change for any operating system once known as NT.

Hibernation
Windows 2000's hibernation feature is a potential convenience, not just for notebook users but for desktop users as well. When you turn on hibernation support, the Hibernate option is added to the shutdown menu. If you select this option, Win2000 saves the exact state of your applications, desktop, and open windows so that when you turn the computer back on, they all appear exactly as you left them.

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Win2000 power management supports hibernation on many PCs, even desktops and older laptops that lack full support for it.

Hibernation is one feature for which more RAM is actually not better. That's because Windows needs to save your entire memory image to disk. You'll need at least as much free disk space as you have RAM. On larger RAM systems, 128MB or more, selecting the hibernation shutdown option can translate into a lot of disk I/O. So it may take some time to save and restore the system from hibernation. On a 32MB ThinkPad test system, it took about 20 seconds to go into hibernation and 45 seconds to come out of it. That's faster than booting, but the time advantage might be lost on a system with 256MB of RAM. (Note: 32MB is actually less than Microsoft's recommended minimum system requirements for Windows 2000 Pro.)

We also experienced what seemed like a small anomaly when the system emerged from hibernation. Although the PC was set up to automatically log on whenever the system was booted, when emerging from hibernation it prompted for a password before it would restore the desktop. In a high-security setting, that's just what you'd want Win2000 to do. If you hibernated your notebook and it was stolen, you'd want it to prompt for user authentication when the thief tried to turn it on.