What’s With All These Versions of Windows Anyway?
I installed Beta 2 of Millennium. It’s sucky, even for a beta. All the changes are under the hood. Even the GUI hasn’t been updated to match Win 2000’s niceties. In fact, it looks exactly like 98. The new features it has are inoperable. Hibernation dumps ram to hard disk on shutdown, and when you start up the computer, it reloads the ram back in and your computer reverts to exactly how it was before you left it (a very quick boot up time). It works like a charm on Win2000. For Millennium, It doesn’t. I’ve read everywhere that “rollback recovery” doesn’t work either (where you can reset your drivers and configs to a past setting in case something screws up). I got rid of millennium and put back 98. It’s stabler.
Anyway, the deal is Millennium is the consumer windows. It’s userfriendly, widely hardware and software compatible, and as unstable as the win98 we all know and “love”. Win2000 is a great system, it’s only bad point is that it is incompatible with some devices, and more importantly, fails to run games. Battlezone 2 and Swat 3 refused to start. Other than that, Win2000 feels rock solid, is very polished and looks nice.
The next version of Windows is code named Whistler (2002), merging the two MS o/s strands and dumping the rickety DOS code base. They are changing the desktop, turning it into something akin to today’s web portal, and rumour has it they are going to make the entire thing customisable (skinnable, basically). It looks awesome, frankly. I’ve seen faded shots of it in the newspaper, might hunt around the net for more.
Here’s a ZDNet article comparing the five major operating systems (no BeOS mentioned though).
11:30pm (GMT +10.00) 
