On the hardware front, I had no luck whatsoever until recently with getting my Sound Blaster Live! Value to work. A hacked driver from an internal build of Win2k fixed that (see the end of this preview for such resources). I have sound now, though none of the special features of the Live!… hopefully, Creative Labs will release a full-featured driver sometime soon. I also managed to get CD audio extraction working using the ASPI ME utility, which I used for NT 4.
 

Now come the problems. Win2k is the first NT to ship with a hard drive defragmenter. In fact, it ships with a customized version of DisKeeper Lite. On two occasions when I defragmented my hard drive I discovered a lot of errors using CHKDSK (the disk repair utility that is part of NT). When a drive is damaged, it tries to fix it on the next restart. Unfortunately for me, its efforts at fixing destroyed the file system! Small files were left intact but larger ones were truncated to 4 kb. While it may have been possible to recover this, it was too much of an inconvenience so I reinstalled. I feel that this maybe have something to do with the fact that I am using FAT32 on my system and boot partitions. My solution for the moment is to do all my defragmentation and repairing from my win9x install. This works and happens to be faster. This issue will definitely be fixed before release.
 

I have been using this install of win2k for quite a while now and have not come across much problems as such. There are some minor quirks such as the modem taking a long time to reinitialize after a cancelled dial up attempt but this is not a big problem. Overall, it is a lot more responsive than my old NT 4 installation and is faster for surfing than Win9x (due to an improved TCP/IP stack as well as the latest iteration of IE 5). Startup speed is slower than Win9x but this is understandable because of its NT heritage. On the other hand, shutdown speeds compete quite well with Win9x.