Newer computers supposedly use a power management method called the
Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), but I don't recall seeing
ACPI as an option in the various laptops I've looked at in the past year. In
addition, I'm not thrilled about having to buy all new computers when NT 5.0
arrives next year.
Will NT 5.0's hardware changes force you to get new drivers for your
hardware? The answer depends on whether you want to use all of NT 5.0's
features. Because Microsoft received a lot of flack when it made NT 4.0 disk
drivers incompatible with NT 3.51 drivers, Microsoft designed NT 5.0 so that it
can use NT 4.0 drivers. However, if you use NT 4.0 drivers, you won't be able to
use NT 5.0's new features to the fullest extent. To take advantage of
multimaster replication, nested groups, PnP, no reboots, and power management,
you'll have to update your drivers. (For information about hardware
requirements, see the sidebar "Updating Your Drivers and Setting Your Sites
for Windows NT 5.0," page 128.)
Network News
Although many of NT 5.0's networking capabilities have been public for a
while, Microsoft introduced several new network tools at the PDC. Two of those
tools will let you more easily build Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) on the
Internet or private intranets. Currently, NT's main VPN tool is Point-to-Point
Tunneling Protocol (PPTP), which ships with Remote Access Service (RAS). A
protocol similar to PPTP--Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP)--will appear in RAS
for NT 5.0. NT 5.0 will also feature Ipsec, a system that lets you add security
to IP networks at the IP level. (For information about PPTP, see Douglas Toombs,
"Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol," June 1997, and Douglas Toombs, "DNS
and PPTP for Network Security," August 1997.)
Once you have built your VPN, you might want to play NetShow video
broadcasts. By supporting multicasting, NT 5.0's routing software will simplify
playing such broadcasts. Multicasting is a technology similar to broadcasting,
except that broadcasting communicates with every computer on the network and
multicasting communicates only with selected machines.
All the network news is about IP because it is the default network protocol
for NT 5.0. Fortunately, controlling IP will get easier. NT 5.0 will have an
improved administrative user interface, and you'll be able to do all your server
administration without rebooting. Microsoft will also plug a long-standing hole
in NT networking by including distributed time server software in NT 5.0.
Although I have learned how to compensate for this past oversight, I'll be glad
to have the software automatically synchronize all the NT boxes (and yes, the
time server software does understand time zones).
Improvement Potpourri: Upgrade Paths and More
At the PDC, Microsoft revealed other NT 5.0 developments that did not fall
in the five areas I just covered. One such announcement was that NT 5.0 will
have an upgrade path from Win9x. Currently, if you install NT 4.0 on a system
that already contains Win95, the NT setup program cannot read the Win95
Registry. As a result, you cannot migrate your applications to NT and instead
must reinstall all your applications. However, the NT 5.0 installer will
understand both the Win95 and Win98 Registries, so you can upgrade a machine
from Windows to NT without trouble.
Other interesting improvements include:
- NT 5.0's kernel will have a tool that lets you point to a program and tell
the system, "If this program takes up more than X megabytes of space or
more than Y seconds of CPU time, automatically terminate it (or reduce its
priority or alert you, etc.)."
- Under NT 5.0, you can build a single version of a program to support many
different languages.
- NT 5.0 will include a text-to-speech facility. You just point to a part of
the screen and the computer will speak the screen's text. Although
text-to-speech technology isn't new, it'll be convenient when incorporated into
the operating system.
Is Microsoft Up to the Challenge?
In the past year, Microsoft did not ship any new NT versions, yet it changed
the overall picture of NT immensely. Although NT is gaining acceptance at an
incredible rate--Microsoft claims to have sold over 1 million copies of NT
Server in the past year--NT has lost on the architecture-independence front. In
1996, NT supported four architectures; now, NT supports only Alpha and the Intel
x86 lines.
NT has become more formidable in size. At the PDC, a Microsoft
representative compared NT 3.1, 4.0, and 5.0 by noting that NT 3.1 contains 6
million lines of code, NT 4.0 contains 16 million lines, and so far, NT 5.0
contains 27 million lines! In fact, 400 developers and 400 testers are working
on NT 5.0.
At this point, Microsoft's marketing prowess has all but guaranteed that NT
will be a major desktop operating system in the twenty-first century, if not
the desktop operating system of the future. But NT 4.0's quality
problems and the ill-fated Service Pack 2 leave open the question of whether
Microsoft's development prowess is up to the NT 5.0 challenge. Although no one
can answer that question yet, I saw a disturbing trend at the PDC that might
indicate Microsoft is not ready: More than half of the demonstrations I saw on
the first day failed. The demonstrations did not fail because of unsound
technology. They failed because the Microsoft representatives did not take a few
extra minutes to actually try the demos before attempting them in front
of 7000 potential customers. NT 5.0 is enterprise software, and it can't
be sold like Monster Truck Madness.
If NT 5.0 delivers, it'll be a new benchmark in operating system price and
performance--but let's hope that Microsoft takes its time. Most customers would
rather see a high-quality product that doesn't ship until 2000 than an
unreliable one that takes six service packs to become stable.