Conclusions

The decision to upgrade to Windows 2000 Professional depends on which version of the Windows operating system a company is running today. Our major recommendations include the following:

Windows 95/98 to Windows 2000. Companies already running Windows 95 or 98 on their laptops have the strongest reasons to upgrade. Windows 2000 Professional offers greater reliability and security than Windows 98. At an upgrade price of US$219 per seat (retail), it takes only a few avoided support calls to justify the license fee. Companies that have deployed NT 4.0 on desktops and Windows 95 or 98 on laptops will also see support benefits from standardizing on Windows 2000 Professional across all machines.

Windows 95/98 users will require some retraining to understand Windows 2000’s more restrictive security model and slightly different user interface. The technical upgrade process itself is fairly painless. Windows 2000 Professional can install directly over Windows 95 and Windows 98; NT 4.0 can’t. However, some older Windows 95 applications won’t migrate automatically to Windows 2000; companies will have to reinstall these applications after an upgrade. Most recently-released commercial applications (including Microsoft’s Office 2000) include special setup code that automatically migrates them to Windows 2000 during the operating system upgrade, avoiding the need to reinstall.