Wow, nothing like a little work, huh? As already mentioned, Win2000 is the
best choice now. It will install over win98 very nicely, preserving all
your current desktop and apps settings. It typically contains the drivers
necessary for an office environment pc, so you don't have the device driver
cd swapping you might have with win98. It is vastly more stable than ME. I
have not attempted an install of win2000Server over NT4, we did that a
little differently. We put new servers into production with win2000, and
retired old servers with NT. We did this in stages as servers needed to be
replaced.
There is no need to upgrade the Office yet.
The biggest hurdle you face is going from a non-secure client to a very
secure client. Win2000 demands logins to the machine itself. Make sure you
install an administrator login to every client, and keep records of the
client administrator password for each machine. Install on the client as
the client administrator and users on the client can easily add the software
to their desktop. Networking under win2000 is different too. Allow
yourself time to familiarize yourself with the differences. Client ram
should be a mininum of 128 meg. Don't neglect to load all the ms service
packs and updates to fix bugs.
I much prefer Office XP to all previous versions, despite its slower
performance to Office2000 on my hardware. However, Office XP files support
features earlier versions do not. While this has not caused file
incompatibility for me with my co-workers, they sometimes open my files and
stuff is missing, because their office doesn't support the feature I
embedded into the document. Its sort of like saving an excel file as text,
Microsoft gives the warning that some features will not be saved. In XP you
can save as an Office 97 file, but its a pain keeping the discipline to
refrain from using XP only features. I save as an XP format, then test open
the document in office 2000 before I email it around.
If you are constrained by hardware on the clients, you are allowed to load
Office 2000 under an XP license. it has a lot of improvements over 97,
shares documents with 97 better than XP, is faster than xp on slower cpus,
and runs quite nicely on a Celeron 400, for instance. My biggest complaint
is it can crash on some of my complicated documents, mandating saving the
documents every 10 to 15 minutes as a precaution, while Office XP does not
crash.
Tom Turak
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Roeth [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2002 10:50 AM
Greetings everyone,
I have a network of 13 computers in my office (TCP/IP). All but one are
using W98se. The remaining one is using NT4. As we expand it is becoming
more and more difficult to find the W98 OS for new machines. Rather than
live like the Do Do bird it becomes necessary to upgrade the OS environment
across the board. Since W98 there have been several iterations of MS's OS.
Further, we are using MS Office '97 software, primarily Excel, Word, and
Access. It is understood that the the producitivity software will have to
follow this migration. While I want to upgrade I don't want to render
everyone into a vicious learning curve that will inhibit productivity.
I would like to place 2 new machines with a new OS, on the network if
possible, to acclimate the staff to the new software/OS. I understand there
may be issues between versions of Office* (specifically, can upgrade files
to
a newer version but not the other way around. Correct me if I'm wrong,
please). Naturally, all files will be backed up and stored on a separate
computer, left off the network after being copied over.
So my questions are these;
1. What is the best OS to upgrade to with consideration to the
afforementioned factors?
2. Can a new OS be installed on top of the former OS without compatability
issues?
3. When the new OS is installed, do I need to upgrade the office software
immediately and begin the import/replacement processing of existing files?
I realize I haven't covered all the bases here. I've deliberately left out
"security" issues, knowing that I will implement them with any OS installed.
However, if anyone sees other issues I have overlooked in this writing
please
feel free to comment. I have a reasonable amount of time to implement the
changes in my business environment, time necessary to do the job right.
This
writing simply represents preliminary research steps so that I can acquaint
myself with any potential problems that will exist or occur as I proceed. I
figured it was best to ask those in the know, before I tripped into a huge
mess.
All comments are welcome and appreciated. I look forward to your
response(s).
Regards,
Paul Roeth
Director of Operations
Marketing System's Unlimited, Corp
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