MAILBAG

ENT, Feb 26, 2001

A Windows 2000 Break

I just read Greg Scott's Dec. 13 article "Putting on the Breaks." All I can say is that I feel his pain. Isn't it amazing how much of the legacy of the early '90s is still with us, and just how many still-useful business applications are made up of a patchwork of pre-Windows 95 era stuff? We tend to forget all that as IT professionals. I do a lot of work with OLTP, real-time, and telecommunications systems. A heck of a lot of those still have critical components based on DOS running on rackmount PC hardware. Try finding legacy versions of the compilers or even specific DOS releases that you need to maintain those.

Mike Hutton, CTO

Architectural Cybernetics

East Greenwich, R.I.

I enjoyed Greg Scott's [Dec. 13] column, especially since I just went through moving an Access database I wrote from a Windows 2000 Professional machine to a series of Windows 98 machines, running into reference problems on all of them because the installations were not the same.

Hardware has always been a buga- boo for me since I started using Windows back in 1980. I was working as a speechwriter then using an IBM 8088 and Multimate and switched over to Windows. I find now that I have to set up my main machine to dual boot between Windows ME and Windows 2000 so I can use my scanner. The dealer won't support the scanner under Windows 2000.

Mike Cannon, president

Computer Wizards

Alpharetta, Ga.

Greg Scott wrote a very interesting article on his problems rolling out Windows 2000. I work for a college in Georgia. We migrated away from NetWare toward Windows 2000 Server while doing a complete upgrade to Win98SE on the client side.

We plan to phase in Windows 2000 Workstation over time as legacy applications can be upgraded or terminated.

Windows 2000 Workstation and

Server are the best environment in a perfect world, but the stability they implement comes at the cost of disassociating themselves with a very flaky past, and that breaks a lot of old apps.

Brandon Haag, assistant director of information technology Gainesville College Gainesville, Ga.