REASON #5: Portability
NT has a reputation for not running well on notebooks. However, NT 5.0 increases the system's portability.
NT 5.0 improves NT's power management features. In the past, Microsoft has provided minimal support for the Advanced Power Management (APM) feature, so using NT 4.0 on a notebook often has meant racing to finish your work before the battery dies. NT 5.0 solves this problem by including full support for the new Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) standard. ACPI is a more intelligent version of APM. An ACPI-compliant OS can selectively shut down certain components of a notebook and wake up other components as you need them. For example, PC Cards drain the notebook's battery even when you aren't using the devices. ACPI can shut down the PC Card subsystem when you're not using it. This capability gives your battery a longer life.
For notebooks that don't support ACPI, NT 5.0 includes an enhanced APM system similar to Win95's power management features. When I installed NT Workstation 5.0 on an IBM ThinkPad, a battery meter in the system tray showed me how much power my machine had left. A Suspend option in the Start menu lets NT spin down the hard disk and turn off the active matrix display when you aren't using the machine (a feature I found particularly useful because my ThinkPad takes a long time to boot NT).
NT 5.0 includes a hibernation feature. When the system enters hibernation mode, the hibernation program takes a snapshot of everything in memory (both physical and virtual) and writes that information to an image file on the hard disk. The hibernation program then powers down the system. The next time you turn on your computer, NT 5.0 loads the image file into the machine's memory, and the OS returns to its state before hibernation.
PnP makes PC Cards hot-swappable. Changing PC Cards in previous versions of NT is an arduous process that requires you to shut down the system and restart it every time you add a new card. PnP lets a system immediately recognize and activate cards you plug in to a notebook while the machine is running.
With its battery-saving features and PC Card hot-swapping capabilities, NT 5.0 catches up to notebook users' needs. Microsoft has finally created a portable NT.
REASON #6: Compatibility
One of NT 4.0's fundamental problems is the system's lack of support for Win95. Users who want to upgrade their Win95 machines to NT Workstation 4.0 must install NT in a separate directory, then reinstall all their applications in NT. In contrast, users can install NT 5.0 on top of an existing Win95 installation and painlessly migrate the settings to NT. You don't have to reinstall all your applications when you upgrade. The beta 1 release can install only over Win95 build 950, but Microsoft says that the final release of NT 5.0 will install over both Win95 OEMSR2 and Win98.
NT 5.0 resolves the driver compatibility problem between Win95 and NT. NT 5.0's Windows Driver Model (WDM) lets hardware vendors write one driver that can run on both Windows OSs. The down side of this upgrade is that legacy devices don't fall under the WDM umbrella. The driver model architecture primarily benefits newer hardware, such as USB devices. Nevertheless, NT 5.0's compatibility with Win95 brings NT out of isolation, a feature you can't ignore if your company runs both Windows OSs.
REASON #7: Integrated Internet
NT 5.0 brings users closer to the Internet by integrating Internet Explorer (IE) 4.0 into the desktop and including an improved email client and Web conferencing software. My experience with IE 4.0 indicates that it is a good browser. Its new features include channel support (Microsoft's proprietary push technology) and a more detailed history list.
NT 5.0 replaces the outdated and downright hostile Microsoft Exchange Client (i.e., Windows Messaging Client) with a full-featured mail client called Outlook Express. Screen 3 shows the Outlook Express interface. Within a day of installing Outlook Express, I imported my settings from Eudora and Outlook and began to use Outlook Express for all my email correspondence. Outlook Express provides all the features I need and more.
In addition to email support, Outlook Express includes newsgroup functionality. This feature gives users one interface from which to communicate over the Internet. Outlook Express uses the LDAP protocol to search for email addresses, letting users conduct email address searches through a standard system. By default, Outlook Express plows through seven public email directories when you conduct a search, and you can add customized databases to the address book.
Outlook Express provides a global address directory that you can use in every application that explicitly supports the directory. Although this global directory might annoy some Personal Information Manager (PIM) vendors, having one address book for all your applications is extremely convenient.
NT 5.0 includes an updated version of NetMeeting, a conference tool similar to ICQ and Powwow that lets you communicate with other users over the Internet. NetMeeting includes features from voice and video conferencing to whiteboard diagramming. These features may sound fairly standard, but NetMeeting lets users handle collaborative work across platforms. You've probably worked with shared applications between Windows machines. Working with someone else's copy of Word or Excel via a remote control program from your NT machine isn't terribly impressive. But what if you could work with a program running on a Linux or Solaris computer? Because NetMeeting is also available for UNIX platforms, users on non-Windows platforms can remotely control Windows applications as if they were running those applications natively. That's impressive thin-client technology.
If you've been asking for a simple and powerful one-stop solution for Internet access, then look no further than Outlook Express. Outlook Express seamlessly integrates the Internet into the NT OS.
REASON #8: User Interface
Microsoft has revamped NT's user interface (UI). You've probably heard the rhetoric about IE 4.0 bridging the gap between local and network resources, so I won't rehash it all. I will say that by making IE 4.0's Active Desktop the default UI for all new versions of Windows, Microsoft has created a steep learning curve for users. Accessing local resources as you would access network resources is disconcerting at first. Nevertheless, once I got used to the new UI, I found the Active Desktop interface to be logical and easy to use. (IE 4.0's Active Desktop is the third UI in as many releases of NT.)
Initially, Active Desktop doesn't look very different from Windows Explorer. Screen 4 shows Active Desktop. You still switch between running applications by clicking their buttons on the taskbar, and Active Desktop stores your programs on the Start menu. However, when you look at the desktop more closely, you'll notice some subtle similarities between the UI and Internet browsers. For example, Active Desktop underlines icon names to signify their link to files or applications, and rather than double-clicking an icon to open a folder or program, you single-click it. In addition, Active Desktop builds directory folders in HTML. This use of HTML lets you make folder names as long as you want them to be. You can make information easier for users to find by using descriptions of your folders' contents as the folders' names.
Active Desktop includes Active Components, or HTML code that resides on the desktop. Rather than requiring you to load the content of a Web page through a Web browser, Active Components let you display and interact directly with dynamic data on the desktop. Using Active Components, you can have a news ticker running across the top of your desktop and a box on the right side of the screen that displays the latest sports scores. In NT 5.0, Microsoft has made Internet broadcasting look feasible.
So far, Microsoft has made about 20 Active Components available. These components range from the important (stock tickers and weather maps) to the ridiculous (a 3D, Java-based clock that is extremely difficult to read). By including Active Components in NT, Microsoft has brought the computing world a little closer to the mass media world. The merger of these two worlds is interesting, but not unequivocally positive. Active Components can be informational resources or distracting eyesores. The last thing I need to see at 8:00 a.m. is a dancing Tamagotchi begging for attention.
The most problematic part of Microsoft's use of Active Desktop as NT 5.0's main UI is that Microsoft has replaced the well-tested explorer.exe with the relatively immature iexplore.exe. My IE 4.0 browser crashed several times during testing, and because the browser and the desktop are now one, my desktop crashed every time.
Despite my reservations about Active Desktop's executable and the hesitation you are likely to express when you first face the system's new UI, Active Desktop takes a huge step toward the future of OSs. This UI opens up exciting possibilities for systems administrators and end users.
REASON #9: Multimedia Capabilities
NT 5.0 provides multimedia capabilities that rival the capabilities of Win95 systems. Microsoft has removed DirectX from NT and installed the program as a separate component. Users of previous versions of NT have to use back-level versions of Microsoft's multimedia extensions because their OS doesn't support new products. My NT 4.0 workstation currently runs DirectX 3.0, even though my Win95 machine uses the latest and greatest DirectX 5.0. The final release of NT 5.0 will ship with DirectX 5.0, and the OS will support future versions of DirectX.
NT 5.0 includes Direct3D, which will let game players use 3D accelerators in NT. And NT 5.0 supports Intel's Multimedia Extensions (MMX) technology, which should boost multimedia performance. If you've ever rebooted to Win95 to attain maximum multimedia performance, you'll find NT 5.0's multimedia components a compelling reason to use the new OS.
REASON #10: Scripting
Finally, NT 5.0 includes native support for a scripting language, a feature that the NT community has repeatedly requested. Microsoft has made Perl and REXX interpreters available in the past, but those languages don't integrate tightly enough with the OS for administrators to use them as automation tools. To solve this problem, Microsoft has added the Windows Scripting Host (WSH) to NT 5.0. WSH is a shell that supports multiple scripting languages. WSH can parse and execute Visual Basic (VB) scripts and Java scripts, and WSH exposes several APIs, so developers can create ActiveX-based scripting engines for other languages.
In less than an hour, I used VB 5.0 to create scripts in WSH that automate frequently used UI functions, such as connecting to shares on the network. You can execute the scripts you create from the command line or from Windows Explorer. When you have begun to deploy WSH-based scripts, you'll wonder how you got by without the program.
The Final Judgment
In its current state, NT Workstation 5.0 isn't compelling enough to use full time. From a usability standpoint, you would have trouble telling the difference between NT 5.0 Beta 1 and NT 4.0 with IE 4.0. Microsoft plans to add more features to the code; the company promises the beta 2 release will be a feature upgrade beta, rather than a developer's release. But NT 4.0 customers can already access the biggest enhancement NT 5.0 makes to the workstation OS: IE 4.0.
At the same time, I can't wait to upgrade to the final release of NT Server 5.0. AD makes network management much easier. Kerberos 5, the IP Security Management package, and NTFS 5 make data more secure. The MMC consolidates administrative tools. In addition, the system includes utilities such as Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) and Internet Information Server (IIS), which make NT 5.0 an even better OS for managing large enterprises.
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--Paul Reed
Paul Reed August 11, 1999