Windows 2000

Martin Walker discusses Windows 2000 and speeds up his Internet downloads.

Despite the fact that Microsoft's Windows 2000 was never intended as a general‑purpose consumer product, I've noticed various PC suppliers simply advertising it as yet another Windows upgrade, which must leave some of you wondering whether or not it's a useful purchase for the PC musician. Well, I don't think it is, at least for a few months anyway.

Windows 2000 is available in three versions, all intended for professional users and with price tags to match. The full version of the cheapest Professional edition will cost you about £270, while the Server version costs about £800, and the Advanced Server about £3000. Windows 2000 was originally going to be named Windows NT 5.0, and is a rewritten version of the stable, business‑oriented Windows NT4, incorporating many of the glossy and helpful features of Windows 98, such as an easy‑to‑use interface, support for USB, Firewire, and DirectX 7.0. It also finally provides Plug and Play support for NT users, allowing easier hardware installation. Judging by the many reviews I've read, it seems to be significantly more reliable than its predecessor, and to have slightly faster performance, as well as smoother multitasking.

However, you really need a Pentium II 400MHz processor along with 128Mb of RAM to make the most of its new features, some of which are also dependent on the BIOS used by the motherboard. These include some of its new power‑saving features such as Hibernation, which lets you save the contents of system RAM to your hard drive, so that you can switch off your PC and then carry on working next day as if nothing had happened, with every application appearing exactly as you left it. This could be a real time‑saver for musicians, but although most PCs bought in the last year will have the ACPI‑compliant BIOS needed to fully support these features, others may have problems. You can visit the web site of your motherboard manufacturer to see if you have a Windows 2000‑compatible BIOS.

Supporting Roles

You can see how Download Accelerator Plus works from the bottom of this screenshot: up to four simultaneous connections receive the same file to maintain an excellent download speed despite patchy performance from any one of them (see main text for more details).

For musicians the main problems are that, just like Windows NT, Windows 2000 can be hard to configure and hardware driver support for soundcards is limited at best. For example, even though popular soundcards like Creative Labs' SB Live! were supported from day one in Windows 2000, this was only at the basic level of recording and playback — SoundFonts and audio processing weren't available until Creative wrote a new set of drivers.

In addition, NT's reputation for stability was partly achieved by being very particular about software compatibility, and Windows 2000 continues this tradition, requiring Windows 2000‑compliant setup programs. Very few music applications have yet been declared compatible with Windows 2000, although some music developers are now investigating the issue — Emagic hope to have announced the results of their tests by the time you read this.

In a few months' time, considerably more software will have been tweaked to be Windows 2000‑compatible, and by then there should also be more comprehensive hardware support — at this point it will be safer for Windows 98 users to upgrade if they wish. Soon we'll have more feedback from developers and manufacturers about the specific benefits to musicians — these seem to hinge on the smoother multitasking performance, which should provide lower soundcard latency figures of around 5mS. Although some Windows 95/98 ASIO drivers now offer latencies as low as this, many musicians still have to return to higher values to avoid occasional system glitches. Windows 2000 promises a smoother ride for audio, making it easier to achieve consistently low latency.

However, Windows 2000 needs a new driver design known as WDM (Win32 Driver Model). Though such drivers also work under Windows 98, few companies have yet written any, as they're already having to work hard to support MME, DirectSound, ASIO, and now EASI. WDM also provides multi‑client access to sound hardware, so you could, for instance, run a soft synth and an audio sequencer on the same stereo output, or mix together lots of audio streams. The problem is, however, that this adds 30mS latency.

Cakewalk Music Systems have recently taken the initiative in trying to simplify future soundcard driver design, and many people are now hoping that their recent technical proposals (www.cakewalk.com/ DevXchange/audio_i.htm) will be accepted by all the major soundcard and music application developers. If everyone works together to forge this new standard, we should all be able to enjoy lower latencies and a smoother and glitch‑free ride for audio in general. I, for one, will be happy to try out Windows 2000 if this happens.

Although BeOS has been hailed as the operating system for musicians, much third‑party music‑software development now seems to have been put on the back burner. In contrast, there seems to be some interest in Windows 2000 from music developers who are still looking for an operating system suited to smooth multitasking and low‑latency performance. Meanwhile, just to cloud the issue, a Millennium update for Windows 98 is expected by the end of this year, and is likely to have a redesigned user interface to bring its look more in line with Windows 2000, and to include a new version of Internet Explorer. The consumer version of the true Windows 2000 isn't expected until at least 2001; however, this is not only likely to be rather cheaper than the Professional version available now, but also to guarantee widespread hardware and software support. I'll keep you informed of developments.

Download Accelerator Plus

Most people who download files and updates via the Internet get frustrated by slow download speeds and the cutoffs that can occur in the middle of downloads. Many of you will have spotted shareware and freeware utilities that claim to speed up your Internet link, mostly by modifying entries in the Registry. I've tried a couple myself, and although some users report impressive improvements, like many others I've noticed no difference in performance. I was, therefore, a little sceptical when I came across Download Accelerator Plus, and I was only persuaded to download it by the huge numbers of other people that already had, and the fact that the download was only 928kb. I'm very glad I did.

Download Accelerator Plus automatically activates itself whenever you try to download a file using your normal Internet browser: it will integrate with Internet Explorer 4.x/5.x and Navigator 4.x and above. It claims to accelerate downloading files in FTP and HTTP protocols by up to 300 percent, and it works by using up to four simultaneous connections to receive different parts of the file simultaneously — when the line speed inevitably drops on one connection there are still three others on the go. I haven't experienced huge increases in maximum speed, but where many downloads used to slow down to a crawl part of the way through, most now happily continue at 5.0kb per second.

Even if you get a particularly bad connection, Download Accelerator Plus lets you pause and resume with servers that support this function, or resume if you lose your Internet connection altogether. All you do, when next online, is launch DAP, select the name of the file that you were part‑way through downloading from its main window, and then select Resume.

For some reason the four‑way connection feature doesn't work for me with Resume, but DAP is still a great utility, and most files now come my way at an average speed of a megabyte every 3.4 minutes. At the moment DAP is completely free, and the only slight annoyance is an advertising banner display. Point your browsers at www.speedbit.com.