Mark Minasi’s December 1997 article, “NT 5.0 Gets Better and Better—Mostly,” could not have come at a better time. We were deciding whether to upgrade our servers or purchase new ones. Knowing that we might need a 166MHz processor answers the question and lets us know that upgrading now will not carry us into the NT 5.0 world.
I did not like Mark’s references to questionable improvements. Although Mark’s world sees no need for them, other users and industries do. I used to work with CAD, and you need two monitors for complex work. The screen real estate significantly increases end user productivity. Our options for dual screen configurations were limited to solutions from a handful of hardware vendors who provided drivers for dual monitors with their graphics adapters. I believe DOS supported eight monitors, yet NT originally supported only one. Obviously, Microsoft missed the need for this capability in the first few passes. I can think of business uses for most of the questionable improvements, with the exception of game support. I assume the goal for game support is to eventually get NT into the home.
I am not thrilled about needing new computers for NT 5.0; however, I now have the knowledge to plan and budget for this move. Thank you for a great article.

--Elly Hoinowski

Elly Hoinowski 8/10/1999 2:30:45 PM