NT 5.0 Gets Better and Better--Mostly

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.