Windows 2000 family

Desktop Enhancements. Networking Software. Trending from CNET. Download Now. Developer's Description By Microsoft. Note Windows Service Pack 2 SP2 is now available , and provides the latest updates to the Windows family of operating systems.

Windows Service Pack 1 SP1 is a collection of fixes in the following areas: setup, application compatibility, operating system reliability, and security. SP1 is not considered a required upgrade; Microsoft recommends that customers review the SP1 documentation found under Learn More to determine whether to install SP1. Full Specifications. What's new in version Update.

Release August 25, Date Added July 26, The Update Rollup does not include all non-security related hotfixes and is not subjected to the same extensive regression testing as a full-service pack. Microsoft states that this update will meet customers' needs better than a whole new service pack, and will still help Windows customers secure their PCs, reduce support costs, and support existing computer hardware.

Microsoft ceased support for Windows on 13 July , over ten years since its release. Prior to the final announcement, Windows was called Windows NT 5. This reflected the initial plan for Windows to succeed both the consumer-oriented Windows 98 and business-oriented Windows NT 4. However, in the end, Windows Millenium Edition was released to succeed Windows 98, which led to confusion between the two.

An internal Microsoft presentation released during the U. Microsoft trial titled "Windows Launch Review" from 21 November briefly discusses naming options of the workstation edition. There are 4 major editions of Windows One of the server editions, Windows Small Business Server , is technically considered a separate version.

Files from the IA compile of Windows Server build show a "Windows Personal" login banner, which indicates that such edition could also have been in planning. An MSDN release was sent out to people who wished to evaluate Powered, but an update was pushed out to revert the branding to the Advanced server branding.

It's possible to define additional Explorer panes by using DIV elements in folder template files. This degree of customizability is new to Windows ; neither Windows 98 nor the Desktop Update could provide it. The Indexing Service has also been integrated into the operating system and the search pane built into Explorer allows searching files indexed by its database. Windows supports disk quotas , which can be set via the "Quota" tab found in the hard disk properties dialog box. Microsoft released the version 3.

Sparse files allow for the efficient storage of data sets that are very large yet contain many areas that only have zeros. Reparse points allow the object manager to reset a file namespace lookup and let file system drivers implement changed functionality in a transparent manner. Volume mount points and directory junctions allow for a file to be transparently referred from one file or directory location to another.

It allows any folder or drive on an NTFS volume to be encrypted transparently by the user. To date, its encryption has not been compromised. EFS works by encrypting a file with a bulk symmetric key also known as the File Encryption Key, or FEK , which is used because it takes less time to encrypt and decrypt large amounts of data than if an asymmetric key cipher were used. The symmetric key used to encrypt the file is then encrypted with a public key associated with the user who encrypted the file, and this encrypted data is stored in the header of the encrypted file.

To decrypt the file, the file system uses the private key of the user to decrypt the symmetric key stored in the file header.

It then uses the symmetric key to decrypt the file. Because this is done at the file system level, it is transparent to the user. For a user losing access to their key, support for recovery agents that can decrypt files is built in to EFS.

A Recovery Agent is a user who is authorized by a public key recovery certificate to decrypt files belonging to other users using a special private key. By default, local administrators are recovery agents however they can be customized using Group Policy..

Windows introduced the Logical Disk Manager and the diskpart command line tool for dynamic storage. All versions of Windows support three types of dynamic disk volumes along with basic disks : simple volumes , spanned volumes and striped volumes :. In addition to these disk volumes, Windows Server , Windows Advanced Server , and Windows Datacenter Server support mirrored volumes and striped volumes with parity :.

With Windows , Microsoft introduced the Windows 9x accessibility features for people with visual and auditory impairments and other disabilities into the NT-line of operating systems.

It also has support for many different locales. Windows included version 7. Microsoft published quarterly updates to DirectX 9.

The majority of games written for versions of DirectX 9. The Windows Computer Management console can perform many system tasks. It is pictured here starting a disk defragmentation.

Windows introduced the Microsoft Management Console MMC , which is used to create, save, and open administrative tools. Each of these is called a console , and most allow an administrator to administer other Windows computers from one centralized computer. Each console can contain one or many specific administrative tools, called snap-ins. These can be either standalone with one function , or an extension adding functions to an existing snap-in.

In order to provide the ability to control what snap-ins can be seen in a console, the MMC allows consoles to be created in author mode or user mode. Author mode allows snap-ins to be added, new windows to be created, all portions of the console tree to be displayed and consoles to be saved. User mode allows consoles to be distributed with restrictions applied. User mode consoles can grant full access to the user for any change, or they can grant limited access, preventing users from adding snapins to the console though they can view multiple windows in a console.

Alternatively users can be granted limited access, preventing them from adding to the console and stopping them from viewing multiple windows in a single console. The main tools that come with Windows can be found in the Computer Management console in Administrative Tools in the Control Panel.

It contains Disk Management and Removable Storage snap-ins, a disk defragmenter as well as a performance diagnostic console, which displays graphs of system performance and configures data logs and alerts. It also contains a service configuration console, which allows users to view all installed services and to stop and start them, as well as configure what those services should do when the computer starts.

REGEDIT has a left-side tree view of the Windows registry , lists all loaded hives and represents the three components of a value its name, type, and data as separate columns of a table. REGEDT32 has a left-side tree view, but each hive has its own window, so the tree displays only keys and it represents values as a list of strings.

It is a command line utility that scans system files and verifies whether they were signed by Microsoft and works in conjunction with the Windows File Protection mechanism.

It can also repopulate and repair all the files in the Dllcache folder. The Recovery Console is run from outside the installed copy of Windows to perform maintenance tasks that can neither be run from within it nor feasibly be run from another computer or copy of Windows It is usually used to recover the system from problems that cause booting to fail, which would render other tools useless, like Safe Mode or Last Known Good Configuration, or chkdsk.

Windows introduced Windows Script Host 2. Screenshot of Windows Server When users try to access a network share off the DFS root, the user is really looking at a DFS link and the DFS server transparently redirects them to the correct file server and share. Domain-based DFS roots exist within Active Directory and can have their information distributed to other domain controllers within the domain — this provides fault tolerance to DFS.

DFS roots that exist on a domain must be hosted on a domain controller or on a domain member server. A new way of organizing Windows network domains , or groups of resources, called Active Directory, is introduced with Windows to replace Windows NT's earlier domain model. Active Directory's hierarchical nature allowed administrators a built-in way to manage user and computer policies and user accounts, and to automatically deploy programs and updates with a greater degree of scalability and centralization than provided in previous Windows versions.

It is one of the main reasons many corporations migrated to Windows These improvements are mostly useful in backend database systems, messaging server systems, decision support, and data mining systems. These areas prove helpful when building web infrastructure, application servers, and directory and DNS servers.

Beside these improvements, a lot of effort went into helping administrators by providing useful tools to handle their everyday work. These tools are often based on a wizard system that aids in administrative tasks step by step.

The smallest version is Windows Server. This entry-level version is suitable for use as a file, print, intranet, and infrastructure server. Neither is it intended as a database server, unless the load is modest and the demands for availability are small. But this version includes IIS 5. There is, however, a way to use this server as a member in large web clusters.