Bill Gates demonstrates Windows 2000 at Comdex

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates demonstrated Windows 2000 earlier this week atSpring Comdex and unlike last year's infamous Windows 98 crash at the sameevent, it went well this time around. Gates demonstrated the bandwidthavailability features of Windows 2000, where system administrators canactually control the amount of network bandwidth each client gets on aWindows 2000 network. But the big demo--and admittedly, this will be acornerstone of my own Windows 2000 review next week--was the introduction ofWindows Terminal Services (WTS), an add-on for Windows 2000 Server thatallows for multiple simultaneous remote access to the server.

Unlike the previous version of this, which was sold as a separate version ofWindows NT (Windows NT Terminal Server 4.0), WTS will be available as anoption during the install of any Windows 2000 Server product, includingAdvanced Server. It's basically a remote session on the server, which thefull Windows desktop, similar to a graphic Telnet session or a remote XWindow session for UNIX users. But because this is Windows, users with evenancient Windows 3.x machines and little RAM will be able to use this featureto run the latest software--such as Office 2000--over a Windows 2000 networkor the Internet at full speed. It's exciting stuff.

Other Windows 2000 features demoed by Gates includes file synchronizationfor mobile users, new power management capabilities, and multiple monitorsupport (a demo was preformed with three monitors). Gates also demonstratedthe new Microsoft mouse, which does away with the mouse "ball" and insteaduses an optical sensor to more accurately portray movement. Gates says thenew mouse signals an end to an era for computer mice, since the new versionis far more reliable, never needs to be cleaned, and won't break as oftenbecause it has fewer moving parts. It's looks good; expect to see it instores this fall.

A couple of other comments of note: Windows 2000 will ship in October, asexpected and the Consumer Windows that ships in 2000 will be the lastversion of Windows based on the Windows 9x kernel (but then, we've heardthat before)