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What's so compelling about Windows NT 5.0? So compelling that Microsoft would forgo near-term profits by advising corporate customers to skip Windows 98 and upgrade to NT 5 Workstation when it comes out next year?
Perhaps it's the myriad new features and functions-many significant, many cosmetic. Whatever the case, based on our work with the "feature complete" second beta, NT 5.0 looks generally impressive.
That's not to say the beta version is ready for prime time. Many features aren't fully implemented, driver support is spotty and online help for new features is nearly nonexistent. On the other hand, the code proved surprisingly stable once it was installed. Still, beta bugs infected the NT 4.0-to-NT 5.0 upgrade process, which often resulted in crashes that required a clean install.
Some of the most critical upgrades in NT 5.0 involve networking and security functionality.
Networking Functions
Topping the networking enhancements, Microsoft rewrote the TCP/IP stack to better handle large packets, provide selective acknowledgments and better cope with transit delays. One nifty feature: If the operating system cannot find a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server upon start-up, it will assign itself a temporary IP address to enable the IP stack. Meantime, it will keep trying to find a DHCP server and a proper IP address.
NT 5.0 also adds support for IP's Reservation Protocol, network address translation and native ATM network interface cards, though we did not test these features.
Active Directory is the most important new feature in NT Server. Active Directory is largely based on the Domain Name System, and in fact, uses DNS to resolve directory object names. Active Directory also is tightly integrated into NT 5.0's policy management. For our test, we migrated an NT 4.0 network to Active Directory, beginning with the primary domaincontroller, and then added new...